40 ms·

Apart from the general slowness and crashes caused by the issues you mention, I remember UAC was way too intrusive (sometimes you would see 4 or 5 alerts in a r

Apart from the general slowness and crashes caused by the issues you mention, I remember UAC was way too intrusive (sometimes you would see 4 or 5 alerts in a row that would monopolize your screen), copying files was slow as a snail an tended to outright crash for large sets of files, and suspend never really worked in my laptop. Anyway, how is a consumer product that provides a bad experience to the user (regardless of the reasons) "amazing"?

angelsl 9y ago
The "improved" aka "less annoying" UAC that we have by default now is as good as no UAC [1]. [1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=94105 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=...
- BillinghamJ 9y ago
  But noisy UAC ends up being ignored completely by users - there's a very fine line to walk in order to ensure that it protects truly sensitive actions and is recognised by users as such.
- JBiserkov 9y ago
  >As Larry Osterman noted, UAC is not a security feature. It's a convenience feature that acts as a forcing function to get software developers to get their act together. What a great new perspective.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I don't know how it looks like nowadays, but I remember Apple forums used to have questions how to run as root to avoid having to deal with such dialogs.
- mixedCase 9y ago
  Loving how the tone of the article is more about "you dumb users" and not "our architecture is so shit we couldn't implement a feature so we just lied to our users instead".
- gargravarr 9y ago
  All UAC ever did was further re-enforce the already deeply-ingrained MS convention of 'just click OK' without reading the dialog. It never told you why the program needed elevated access, only that it needed it for it to do what you wanted. And of course, the average user just wants their computer to do what they asked. I would see some users run a program and automatically move their mouse to the place the UAC prompt would appear, seconds before the prompt ever came up. That's a whole new level of programming people. The only time I can think it ever came in handy was if the user had an unprivileged account and would need an admin to type in the password - hopefully the admin would ask the why question and dig into it before dismissing the UAC prompt.
radicalbyte 9y ago
To be honest, suspend still doesn't work properly, even in the latest version of Windows 10.
- loooooooooooool 9y ago
  Hibernation works good, taking into account that Turn Off really means Hibernate.
- nfriedly 9y ago
  Lol, yep. My Win 10 desktop will suspend just fine, but then it wakes itself up for no apparent reason and just stays running indefinitely after that. I can't figure out what the cause is, but I've taken to just shutting it down in between uses.
  - swsieber 9y ago
    This. I was playing Starcraft before bed, and just shut my laptop to suspend it... it was suspended until about 4 hours later, when, in the middle of the night my wife and I were awoken by sounds of zerglings dying. Very unpleasant, and quite surprising.
  - kmeade 9y ago
    I'm a frequent sleeper and I depend on the feature. Next time your machine wakes up by itself, go to a DOS prompt and type "powercfg -lastwake" That will tell you how it happened. For me, part of the solution was to go into the device manager and edit the properties for my mouse and my network controller. On the "power management" tab I disabled the "allow this device to wake up the computer" option. I only use the keyboard to wake the PC. Additionally, when I left the machine sleeping overnight, there was some scheduled task that would occasionally wake the machine. There is a way to disable that, but I forget the specifics.
    - nfriedly 9y ago
      Cool, I'll try that sometime. I'm traveling for the next couple of weeks, so it'll be too late to report back here, but thanks in advance. I really wouldn't be bothered by occasional wakeups if it would go back to sleep afterwards...
InclinedPlane 9y ago
Copying files is an interesting case study. Vista was actually faster but perceived to be slower. XP wouldn't actually tell you when copying was 100% complete. If you turned off your power supply the second XP's copy dialog went away you'd lose data. Vista sped up file copying operations but fixed that bug, leading to a faulty perception of slowness. Worse, the progress bar behavior encouraged that perception of slowness. A progress bar that speeds up at the end will be perceived to be faster than one that is perfectly even which in turn is perceived faster than one that slows down at the end. And vista's progress bar usually slowed down at the end because it didn't properly account for those disk sync et al operations ahead of time. The result was a worse feeling experience despite what was happening under the hood.
- aperrien 9y ago
  Did this combine with the prefetch situation? It always seemed to me that the files were doing some sort of inspection of state as the dialog box progressed. Even things like Ultracopier seemed to run into this problem.

angelsl 9y ago

The "improved" aka "less annoying" UAC that we have by default now is as good as no UAC [1]. [1]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=94105 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20160816-00/?p=...

BillinghamJ 9y ago
But noisy UAC ends up being ignored completely by users - there's a very fine line to walk in order to ensure that it protects truly sensitive actions and is recognised by users as such.
JBiserkov 9y ago
>As Larry Osterman noted, UAC is not a security feature. It's a convenience feature that acts as a forcing function to get software developers to get their act together. What a great new perspective.
pjmlp 9y ago
I don't know how it looks like nowadays, but I remember Apple forums used to have questions how to run as root to avoid having to deal with such dialogs.
mixedCase 9y ago
Loving how the tone of the article is more about "you dumb users" and not "our architecture is so shit we couldn't implement a feature so we just lied to our users instead".
gargravarr 9y ago
All UAC ever did was further re-enforce the already deeply-ingrained MS convention of 'just click OK' without reading the dialog. It never told you why the program needed elevated access, only that it needed it for it to do what you wanted. And of course, the average user just wants their computer to do what they asked. I would see some users run a program and automatically move their mouse to the place the UAC prompt would appear, seconds before the prompt ever came up. That's a whole new level of programming people. The only time I can think it ever came in handy was if the user had an unprivileged account and would need an admin to type in the password - hopefully the admin would ask the why question and dig into it before dismissing the UAC prompt.

radicalbyte 9y ago

To be honest, suspend still doesn't work properly, even in the latest version of Windows 10.

loooooooooooool 9y ago
Hibernation works good, taking into account that Turn Off really means Hibernate.
nfriedly 9y ago
Lol, yep. My Win 10 desktop will suspend just fine, but then it wakes itself up for no apparent reason and just stays running indefinitely after that. I can't figure out what the cause is, but I've taken to just shutting it down in between uses.
- swsieber 9y ago
  This. I was playing Starcraft before bed, and just shut my laptop to suspend it... it was suspended until about 4 hours later, when, in the middle of the night my wife and I were awoken by sounds of zerglings dying. Very unpleasant, and quite surprising.
- kmeade 9y ago
  I'm a frequent sleeper and I depend on the feature. Next time your machine wakes up by itself, go to a DOS prompt and type "powercfg -lastwake" That will tell you how it happened. For me, part of the solution was to go into the device manager and edit the properties for my mouse and my network controller. On the "power management" tab I disabled the "allow this device to wake up the computer" option. I only use the keyboard to wake the PC. Additionally, when I left the machine sleeping overnight, there was some scheduled task that would occasionally wake the machine. There is a way to disable that, but I forget the specifics.
  - nfriedly 9y ago
    Cool, I'll try that sometime. I'm traveling for the next couple of weeks, so it'll be too late to report back here, but thanks in advance. I really wouldn't be bothered by occasional wakeups if it would go back to sleep afterwards...

InclinedPlane 9y ago

Copying files is an interesting case study. Vista was actually faster but perceived to be slower. XP wouldn't actually tell you when copying was 100% complete. If you turned off your power supply the second XP's copy dialog went away you'd lose data. Vista sped up file copying operations but fixed that bug, leading to a faulty perception of slowness. Worse, the progress bar behavior encouraged that perception of slowness. A progress bar that speeds up at the end will be perceived to be faster than one that is perfectly even which in turn is perceived faster than one that slows down at the end. And vista's progress bar usually slowed down at the end because it didn't properly account for those disk sync et al operations ahead of time. The result was a worse feeling experience despite what was happening under the hood.

aperrien 9y ago
Did this combine with the prefetch situation? It always seemed to me that the files were doing some sort of inspection of state as the dialog box progressed. Even things like Ultracopier seemed to run into this problem.