I've been looking to buy a laptop for awhile and decided it was worth the wait until Vista made its full debut. I tried some of the Vista betas but had difficulty with drivers for my custom built desktop machine. Nonetheless, I'm still quite excited about Vista.

I've heard and read many things about Vista, both positive and negative. The most significant negative I've come across is the sheer number of UAC prompts. No security mechanism is perfect, and we do trade security for convenience, but the purpose of UAC, as I understand it, is to prevent the granting of elevated privileges to rogue programs. I've heard someone say Microsoft went too far with UAC in building in security, but is there a way to reduce the number of UAC prompts and maintain the level of security it provides? (And for any nitpickers, I'm well aware UAC is by far not the only element of security added to Vista, but it does seem to be the most visible to end users)

I've heard people complain that Administrator is not the "true" administrator on Vista, that you still get plenty of UAC prompts. Again, looking closely at where we've come from, users are used to running as Administrator on XP. Like it or not, the Administrator account must also be locked down to some degree. UAC isn't a magic bullet, and it seems imperfect (but is any single security mechanism sufficient?) but it is also there to avoid granting privileges to programs that shouldn't have them.

On the positive side, I've read that once you get through the initial configuration of your machine, after running the various programs that need the elevated privileges to install, UAC quiets down. I'll soon see what my experiences with UAC are.

I just came across a post I really liked at Ryan Bemrose's blog (The Audio Fool). He discusses various classes of legacy applications that we will be running on Vista and how these affect UAC. You can read his post at Categories of Legacy Applications 

I don't have my Vista laptop yet, but once I do I plan on documenting my early experiences with it. I realize that I'm an experienced software engineer, significantly more technical than the average user, so I'm actually expecting far more UAC prompts than average. I'll be documenting which I believe are those that end users will deal with and those that myself, installing certain more technical pieces of software, will encounter. My challenge to myself is to avoid turning UAC off, though I might consider using the security policy edit I've come across to grant the Administrator account full administrator privileges in order to avoid UAC prompts.

At this point in time I'm highly optimistic about Vista, and while acknowledging my pro-Microsoft bias, I'll try to report as honestly as I can :) Sometimes Microsoft technology does frustrate me (I have stories for another time).