Continuing my notes on Vista usage:
- User Access Control or UAC is really as annoying as Apple depicts it in the famous ad. I have switched it off after an hour of clicking “Allow” all the time. Not only it is annoying, it also prevents the programs that are not aware of it from copying certain files which UAC thinks it has to “protect”. I use a program called Far Manager to work with files and it was just complaining about not being able to copy certain files (not even sure what was so special about them, not the system files certainly). When I disabled UAC the copying started working without problems.
- Constant disk activity can drive you mad. In my case it was caused by one of the “features” which I think lots of Vista users will be turning off. It is a “shadowing” feature which you can enable for each hard drive separately. It basically saves the copies of all your data so that you can later go back to a previous version of any file, directory or even all hard drive.
That’s great of course. In theory. In reality I have a 500 Gb hard drive which is half full already with data, movies, games and other big files. This data is constantly updated by me and Vista constantly copies everything. Not only the constant disk activity is annoying, but this eats the hard drive space too. When I disabled the feature I immediately got back 50 Gb of free space. I’ve decided that I’ll better use good old undelete from a 3rd party vendor to get the accidentally deleted files back.
Both of these “misfeatures” reminded me about one thing that I hate in programs like Putty. The developers do not let you save the password by design. They think that this is the best way to provide maximum security for the password. If the password is not saved anywhere in the program, then no one has any chance to hack the program and steal it. Right? Wrong!
The only thing that they achieve with this approach is that the users have to write their passwords elsewhere. On piece of paper, in the notepad, everywhere. Is this more secure then letting the user store the password in the program and then using some advanced technique to properly encrypt it? Nope, this only makes security a bigger problem. Of course, it becomes the users own problem, the software developers can not be held responsible if someone stills that paper with a password from the user’s desk. That’s so wrong in my opinion.
And the same happens with that 2 features in Vista. A person like me just turns them off because of their annoyance. Both features are great in theory and I definitely like to use them but not at the cost of such annoyance.
UAC is actually so wrong that I am quite sure Microsoft will be fixing it in the first Service Pack for Vista.
