What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

BioSensorAB » What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

BioSensorAB » What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista? — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 02:27:19 GMT

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I leave it on now

EmJayPrice — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 05:59:57 GMT

Throughout the Vista beta, every time I reinstalled the first thing I would do is turn off UAC.

Since RTM, however I started leaving it on. I wanted to see what the average consumer experience would be like.

UAC pops up during configuration and app install and then just mostly goes away. It really is not a big deal.

I think the implementation has been done very well.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

doomer — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 11:25:23 GMT

I'm using psexec -l of Mark Russinovich to run programs working with potentially dangerous contents. It's required a small shortcut modification.

Why do not integrate such feature into OS? So you just need to set one check box to run a program under limited rights.

P.S. How many users from mentioned 88% know how to shut up UAC?! I suppose the most part of them just wanted modern looking OS with cool features.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Chris Jackson — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 04:10:51 GMT

Hi Doomer,

Running applications at low IL is really a power user scenario. Most apps break when you do this, so I think psexec is a pretty good home for it. What regular user scenario are you thinking of?

Our data doesn't indicate what users know, just what they do. But I'm guessing your question was rhetorical.

Thanks, Chris

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

rlipscombe — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:12:55 GMT

OK, so I'm a software developer, and not exactly representative of your typical Vista user, but I run with UAC turned off. BUT, I also run almost all of the time with a standard user account (usually relying on Fast User Switching when I need admin mojo). Do you have any numbers for that scenario, either on XP or Vista?

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

sloth — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 18:39:16 GMT

I'm a software developer and think UAC is a great addition to Windows. I run as an admin and after the initial setup of my machine I hardly ever deal with a UAC prompt.

The only exception is that I use the Registry Editor a fair amount and because it has the requestedExecutionLevel set to "highestAvailable" it always prompts me to elevate even if I only want to view some data. Is there a way have it run "asInvoker" without the prompts?

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

MichaC — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:07:17 GMT

I'd be interested to see how many people turn UAC back on if they've turned it off at any point. I had it up for a while, and was pretty happy with it, but I had to turn it off to get a COM server that I was developing against to register correctly and never bothered to turn it back on after that. It would be great if I could just snooze it so that after one restart it was turned off, but after the next restart it would be back on again.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Mark Sowul — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 22:42:38 GMT

I have it on, and in fact I like how the app virtualization keeps my settings for crap programs out of program files and now puts them under my folder where they belong.

Major thumbs down to Valve for making the Steam folder world-writeable. Ugh.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

tucan — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:28:09 GMT

I love UAC.

UAC is one of my favourite Vista's features

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Ganesh — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:19:13 GMT

UAC turned down? Why would anyone want to do that and compromise thier own security.

Guess the remaining 12% are more concerned about thier 'prompts' than security.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Chris Jackson — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 07:36:10 GMT

rlipscombe - I don't have those numbers. But, if you are a standard user, why turn UAC off? When you're not an admin, we've only given you features, and not taken anything away? It's a bit more pure, I admit, but UAC sure does fix a lot of stuff!

sloth - if you shim with RunAsInvoker you can override a manifest.

MichaC - why did you have to turn UAC all the way off to register something? If you're calling regsvr32, can't you just run that from an elevated commmand prompt?

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Peter Simon — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:52:31 GMT

I do not have UAC turned on because I learnt to control my pc ( I started pretty while ago on DOS ) and it annoyed me that popped up a lot but it is still annoying that Vista is still begging me all the time to switch it on .

good feature though for a regular user.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Chris Jackson — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 20:28:45 GMT

Peter Simon - I like to think that I have some idea of how to control my PC as well. Part of controlling my PC is ensuring that I don't hand over full admin credentials to all of the applications I run, as well as to every web site that I browse to. UAC gives me the ability to be more selective (more conveniently) with the powers I hand to other peoples' code so I can *really* control my PC. So, I think it's a pretty good feature for everyone.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

DanG — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 23:05:36 GMT

I *would* run as a standard user, but...

Here is my monthly headache scenario.

1. Windows Update tells me there are new updates to install. I tell it to go ahead and install them, after looking them over to make sure they all make sense.

2. UAC pops up, asking me if I want to run Windows Update. Gosh, I dunno. I just clicked on "Install Updates". OK, so this is just annoying.

3. The updates install. No sweat. Yet.

4. I go to bed. My wife gets up early in the morning, and tries to read her email. Nothing happens.

5. Wife wakes me up. I groggily stumble out to the kitchen. Yup, no email. Hmmm, I can ping outside. Argh. OH YEAH.

6. I switch to my account, log in, and check *my* email. This time, Norton Internet Security (aka Norton Prevent Me From Doing Anything Useful) displays a dialog box (buried under the Windows Mail dialog, where I can't see it at first) that says "Hey, Windows Mail has been modified since the last time you used it. Are you sure you want to run it?" No kidding -- Windows Update modified it when I installed updates! I click "OK, let this program run any time", switch back to my wife's account, and let her download and read her email.

7. Ditto for Internet Explorer.

What's the difference between our two accounts? The one that gets the message window from Norton is mine -- the administrator. My wife's is a standard user account, and she gets zero, zilch, nada.

Whose fault is this? As a user, I don't care. All I know is that if my account weren't an administrator, I'd probably have no clue why my wife's email wasn't downloading.

Of course, maybe there's a setting somewhere, in some control panel, that'll make the same pop-up appear for her. But I haven't found it -- and I've looked.

UAC and standard user privileges are great. Honest. On "that other OS", I like the fact that I have to use "sudo". And I can usually use "Run as" (though, not always) to do what I need to from a standard account on Windows. But it sure does get in the way of getting work done (and, once a month, in the way of my sleep).

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Chris Jackson — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:41:37 GMT

DanG-

Interesting - looks like we could assist one of our partners in investigating the standard user scenario. Let me see what I can do.

Thanks,

Chris

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

xGamer — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 12:31:46 GMT

Windows XP never had UAC and I never have once been hacked or anything else. My router and norton 360 do a pretty good job. UAC, Windows Defender, un-needed drivers and so forth do nothing for me except use additional resources and are irratating.

So using vLite, I took out 80% of what I didn't need. The full install also only uses about 4.5GB of space and resources / memory usage is less than before too. However, I still have Aero plus I use TweakVI (for processor caching) and VistaGlazz as well.

http://i27.tinypic.com/2md4hw2.jpg

http://i27.tinypic.com/mwfltw.jpg

(No, there is no gamer edition.. I made that just for fun)

Removing most of the unneeded stuff also improved file copy issues as well. Overall, It's like using Win XP but it just looks prettier. I've done tons of tweaking since I mostly play games but until MS will develop a Vista Ultimate x64 strickly for gamers, I guess we just have to do it ourselves.

Gamer

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Jason Spicer — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 04:57:26 GMT

I would't mind dismissing Yet Another Popup, if it would have the decency to pop up already. UAC takes for-freaking-ever to ask my permission to do something I just told the computer to do. If it happened right away, it would be no biggie, but I frequently have to wait 20, 30, 40 seconds (sometimes way, way longer--about 30 minutes for a game download and install once) before the UAC prompt on the secure desktop. This is why I want to turn the damn thing off--because of its horrible performance! And it's all well and good to blame this on ill-behaved apps, but who owns UAC? That's right, Windows. I suspect for most users UAC is just another reason why Vista comes across as one of the clunkiest Windows releases ever.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Chris Jackson — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:16:31 GMT

Hi Jason,

Great point, and I addressed your concern here: http://blogs.msdn.com/cjacks/archive/2008/03/31/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-see-the-uac-prompt-sometimes-diagnosing-slow-uac-prompts.aspx

Thanks,

Chris

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

orchidpop — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 07:59:41 GMT

Hi. Not sure if we can ask for things to be shimmed, but TaxAct (desktop version) has this need. If you allow it to check for new versions online at startup or if you force it, with UAC on, it prompts you every time. I contacted the vendor on a few occasions, but they didn't seem concerned about this.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Chris Jackson — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 04:59:40 GMT

Hi orchidpop,

There isn't really a shim to fix that - updating program files does require elevation. But the design itself could obviously be improved. They should be able to check for updates non-elevated, and even download them. Then, they could start a small elevated process that installs these updates. However, for all I know, they are already doing that. (I know I use a competing tax application, and it finds updates every single time it runs.) The alternative design would be to have a per-user install and not require admin rights ever. Either way, the app is behaving correctly afaik.

Do you think a per-user install is a good thing? (This is frequently a matter of debate - that's the approach I would use here, but some would disagree.)

Chris

Chris Jackson's Semantic Consonance : What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Relationship Compatibility — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:38:00 GMT

From the "doesn't just saying it make it true?" department: I was reading the March 2008 issue of Maximum PC (I love my Maximum PC), and while I like the real dirt and the attitude, I just don't understand the extent of their hatred of UAC.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

ABC — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:15:28 GMT

Hi,

If we are applying the RunAsInvoker shim, we can take some what relax for that application. But I could see there are lot of other shims which will do the same job as like RunAsInvoker.

Please could anyone clear my confusion among these.

1)ForceAdmin

2)RunAsHighest

3)RunAsInvoker

please I need this urgent.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Chris Jackson — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:12:15 GMT

ForceAdminAccess - always say you're an admin, even if you are not.

RunAsHighest - use the highest token available. If you're a standard user, you only have 1, so no change. If you're an admin, then use the elevated token.

RunAsInvoker - Run as whoever you are.

These are all documented in the help - open up act.chm (the help topics function in CompatAdmin is broken so you may have to browse there directly).

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

ABC — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:43:24 GMT

So, If I am applying the "RunAsAdmin", only admin rights will be applied to the particular application or to whole system?....

Is it the correct process applying RunAsAdmin. I heared it's not the best practice, is it?...

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Chris Jackson — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:57:58 GMT

RunAsAdmin flags that application as requiring admin rights. If you have UAC enabled and are not already running as full administrator, then it will prompt you for elevation of that particular application.

It's not typically the preferred solution, because most organizatons (eventually) want to get to a standard user desktop (if they aren't today), and so using this flag basically says that their standard users won't be able to use that application.

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

ABC — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:52:13 GMT

Let me clear from my side,So what I understood from ur post is, So if we are applying the RunAsHighest, it does not make any sense to resolve the standrard user issues.

Then without applying the shim also the behaviour is same right. So what is the need of this shim then?..

re: What Percentage of Consumers Have UAC Enabled on Windows Vista?

Chris Jackson — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 20:50:42 GMT

There is almost never a good reason to use RunAsHighest - the two I use are RunAsAdmin and SpecificNonInstaller (if it's elevating because we falsely detected it as an installer - better to do this than RunAsInvoker).

I first try to fix the issue that causes the app not to run as a standard user. If and only if I am unable to do anything to fix it will I use RunAsAdmin, but it's always a last resort.