...the biggest problems is always the USER. Now I run my computer as an admin account 100% of the time...
Mistakes
how is this a mistake, My account has admin rights, I normally do things that need those rights daily and changing accounts all the time is well time consuming.
The real title of this thread is "
Do you use an admin account for daily tasks?" - a practice which is universally condemned by every noteworthy computer security specialist on the planet. UAC is a mere side-effect of that question.
In this context, "security" means having control over the movement of information on your computer. In an ideal world, your own information would never
leave without your knowledge, and no code would ever
enter your machine without your permission. Relying on an admin account for daily tasks
reduces the level of control over the movement of information, and thereby lessens security.
Whenever you execute any code as an admin you are totally and completely entrusting your computer and all its information to the author of that code, as well as the authors of any code dependencies, and their dependencies in turn, and so on. From humble freeware to commercial apps costing thousands, all software is made up of imports and helper libraries whose complexity makes it difficult to discern the real author of a given app, let alone whether all of that imported code is entirely trustworthy and free from unintentional security defects.
Counter-intuitively, it is much harder to spot inadvertent security breaches than purposeful maliciousness. AV utilities aim for the latter - their sole purpose is to detect patterns representing known attack code. Where it gets
really hard is when you try to understand how the presence of an app or a given code library and its dependencies may substantially reduce the level of security
without intending to do so. That's part of what UAC does.
XP was designed and released before MS fully embraced LUA principles. While it was theoretically possible to stay with a non-admin account for daily use, in practice it was too impractical. There was no app and registry virtualisation, no UAC, and most developers still wrote code which assumed the user is an admin. Elevation had to be done so frequently and pre-emptively that it may as well have been permanent.
In Vista and Win7 the OS is designed to make LUA practical and UAC is a big part of that. By detecting and flagging attempts to use privileged functionality, UAC makes it possible to avoid reliance on admin accounts while still making use of software which assumes an administrative context.
With UAC disabled, you're most of the way back to XP in terms of LUA practicality; that is, it's impractical -
you have to use an admin account for daily tasks. Personal testimonials about how through skill and good fortune you've managed to avoid getting pwned for 20 years are frankly neither here nor there. What matters is "best practices" stuff.
Until and unless you manage to find a computer security authority willing to advocate the use of privileged accounts for routine tasks, I'd suggest re-evaluating your stance. It's no accident that every major OS is either moving in that direction (Windows) or has been firmly in that camp from day zero (UNIX, Linux, every mainframe and minicomputer OS,...).
