UAC - To be or not to be?

LMiller7 · 25 Oct 2017

For anyone who thinks UAC is too inconvenient, consider the situation as it was in 1996 when NT4 was released. Consider you are logged in with a standard account which even then was a best practice. Security was a concern but not nearly what it is today. Now you want to do something that requires an admin account. There was no UAC, no fast user switching, and no "run as Administrator" option. You had to log out of your account which closed all of your applications. Mind you, that probably wasn't many. You could then log in with the admin account and do what was required. You could then log back in with your standard account, reload your applications, and resume working.

By modern standards NT4 was very primitive and many things that people now take for granted simply did not exist. This was necessary. The minimum RAM requirement for NT4 Workstation was 12 MB, 16 MB for the server version. While trivial by modern standards that was a lot in 1996 and many thought these requirements excessive. There simply wasn't room for sophisticated security features like UAC. That didn't come until Vista was released 10 years later.

elbmek · 28 Oct 2017

LMiller7 said:

By modern standards NT4 was very primitive and many things that people now take for granted simply did not exist. This was necessary. The minimum RAM requirement for NT4 Workstation was 12 MB, 16 MB for the server version. While trivial by modern standards that was a lot in 1996 and many thought these requirements excessive. There simply wasn't room for sophisticated security features like UAC. That didn't come until Vista was released 10 years later.

you got that right too. MY first pc in 1995 was a 108MB HDD with 64MB RAM and it was the biggest rip off in the history of pc's. But at that time I didnt know any better. £800 it cost for parts which probably cost £5!!! The local company went bust and I danced on their 'grave'.

When I found out later on that it was totally rubbish I began building my own, and did that for approx 10 years. Then the prices tumbled and I realised it was cheaper 'off the shelf.