if you're a Windows user you've probably seen that message pop up a fair number
of times perhaps right when you're about to load up one of your favorite games
web browsers or other programs but why does Windows insist on bothering
you like this i mean you clicked on the program you obviously want it to run
don't you well it turns out this is actually a
rather important feature and i'm not talking about something microsoft wants
you to think is important
it's called user account control or uac
and believe it or not it can save you a ton of headaches you see back in the
days when we were running older versions of Windows up to and including xp the
operating system would just run a program when the user asked it to
and while this seems like the way things should be it was actually a massive
security hole by default all programs were given
privileges by Windows and i don't mean like
a little bit of extra RAM for being well behaved but rather programs could
essentially run whatever code they wanted after they were started
now oftentimes this wouldn't cause any problems if an innocuous program like a
word processor was behaving properly the issue is that this also meant that a
poorly coded malfunctioning or even malicious program could cause serious
problems by making changes to the operating system
so starting with Windows vista microsoft took away privileges from programs that
weren't an integral part of the os and started directly asking users if they
wanted to allow a program to make any changes instead of just
letting it happen without any input and although many features included in vista
were ill-conceived and later scrapped
user account control ended up sticking around
the most obvious benefit of uac is that if a malicious program tries to mess
with your system you'll get a pop-up before it can make any changes which you
can use to deny it access but
many other things can result in Windows saying to a program
just what do you think you're doing and asking for your approval so installing
drivers altering many system-wide settings defragmenting a hard drive or
even changing the contents of a folder that the operating system protects like
program files will raise the suspicion of Windows and cause a uac prompt to
appear asking for administrator privileges
so these are the privileges that we talked about a few minutes ago that
older versions of Windows just gave out like candy
and another feature of uac called virtualization even creates special
virtual folders for programs without administrator privileges if they try to
write to an actual protected folder like program files to prevent important
applications from getting corrupted so it's not surprising that when you try
to install new software you might see a uac prompt or even two since program
installers often have to make changes to files and settings that Windows consider
sensitive and if you're setting up a new pc well
it can be annoying since you probably have a lot of applications drivers and i
mean even hardware to install so like
we get it and it's especially irritating to deal with uac when you're opening or
installing programs but we definitely recommend against
disabling it doing this could allow malware to run in the background
completely undetected and besides many modern programs are now written with uac
in mind and don't just assume that Windows will give them administrator
privileges so it's becoming more and more common to see programs that will
run just fine without uac approval
the most important thing though is if you do leave it enabled make sure you're
actually using it leaving it on only to just click yes
every single time without reading the prompt isn't going to help you much it's
kind of like getting a smart video doorbell and then just buzzing in the
crazed looking guy with the knife speaking of knives don't cut away from
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