The Most ANNOYING Windows Feature
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
896 words · ~4 min read
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if you're a Windows user you've probably seen that message pop up a fair number
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of times perhaps right when you're about to load up one of your favorite games
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web browsers or other programs but why does Windows insist on bothering
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you like this i mean you clicked on the program you obviously want it to run
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don't you well it turns out this is actually a
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rather important feature and i'm not talking about something microsoft wants
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you to think is important
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it's called user account control or uac
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and believe it or not it can save you a ton of headaches you see back in the
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days when we were running older versions of Windows up to and including xp the
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operating system would just run a program when the user asked it to
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and while this seems like the way things should be it was actually a massive
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security hole by default all programs were given
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privileges by Windows and i don't mean like
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a little bit of extra RAM for being well behaved but rather programs could
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essentially run whatever code they wanted after they were started
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now oftentimes this wouldn't cause any problems if an innocuous program like a
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word processor was behaving properly the issue is that this also meant that a
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poorly coded malfunctioning or even malicious program could cause serious
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problems by making changes to the operating system
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so starting with Windows vista microsoft took away privileges from programs that
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weren't an integral part of the os and started directly asking users if they
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wanted to allow a program to make any changes instead of just
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letting it happen without any input and although many features included in vista
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were ill-conceived and later scrapped
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user account control ended up sticking around
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the most obvious benefit of uac is that if a malicious program tries to mess
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with your system you'll get a pop-up before it can make any changes which you
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can use to deny it access but
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many other things can result in Windows saying to a program
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just what do you think you're doing and asking for your approval so installing
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drivers altering many system-wide settings defragmenting a hard drive or
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even changing the contents of a folder that the operating system protects like
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program files will raise the suspicion of Windows and cause a uac prompt to
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appear asking for administrator privileges
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so these are the privileges that we talked about a few minutes ago that
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older versions of Windows just gave out like candy
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and another feature of uac called virtualization even creates special
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virtual folders for programs without administrator privileges if they try to
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write to an actual protected folder like program files to prevent important
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applications from getting corrupted so it's not surprising that when you try
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to install new software you might see a uac prompt or even two since program
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installers often have to make changes to files and settings that Windows consider
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sensitive and if you're setting up a new pc well
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it can be annoying since you probably have a lot of applications drivers and i
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mean even hardware to install so like
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we get it and it's especially irritating to deal with uac when you're opening or
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installing programs but we definitely recommend against
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disabling it doing this could allow malware to run in the background
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completely undetected and besides many modern programs are now written with uac
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in mind and don't just assume that Windows will give them administrator
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privileges so it's becoming more and more common to see programs that will
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run just fine without uac approval
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the most important thing though is if you do leave it enabled make sure you're
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actually using it leaving it on only to just click yes
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every single time without reading the prompt isn't going to help you much it's
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kind of like getting a smart video doorbell and then just buzzing in the
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