A reader asks:
Windows User Account settings? What is it? Apparently were "turned Off", supposed to be "turned ON"
-- H. G.
It's one of those safety things that Microsoft constructed poorly. The purpose of UAC (user account control) is to prevent programs from running maliciously, such as when you click a link on a Web page that downloads and runs a dangerous application.
When turned on: each time you start a program (or when a program starts another program) UAC asks you if you want to run the program.
But there are several problems:
- When the warning dialog box appears, we don't really know what the information means, and so cannot act on it intelligently
- The constant display of warning dialog boxes becomes irritating
- After a while, we just click OK all the time, making the system moot
So, we turn off UAC, because it does not provide more help than the anti-virus and anti-malware software that already runs silently and effectively.