New Security Features in Vista
Security has progressively improved with each version of Windows. It had a long way to go. Vista has a number of welcome changes that I describe in this section.
User Account Control
Something you probably noticed within the first five minutes of using Vista is something called User Account Control (UAC). This is a new mechanism wherein Windows will stop and ask you to approve every privileged operation that you are about to perform. If you have permission to perform the task, Vista will still stop and ask if you want to do it—you'll see a pop-up window like the one in Figure 1.
Figure 1. With UAC, even the local admin must confirm privileged operations
If you don't have the necessary privileges to perform the operation, Vista demands more credentials, as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. UAC requires regular users to provide credentials if they want to perform privileged functions
There are several good reasons for this pop up, including:
Making sure you're sure. Nothing like a pop up to stop you in your tracks to make you think twice about what you intend to do (provided you do think about it and do not just blindly click 'OK').
Making sure it's you. If some piece of malware is trying to perform a privileged operation, it's going to generate one of these pop ups. ...
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