James Delahunty
27 Apr 2009 13:10
Microsoft has half-learned a very important lesson from users of the Windows Vista operating systems; enough with the damn User Account Control prompts already! While Windows 7 still has some UAC prompts on by default (surely can be disabled like with Vista) they will be cut down by about 29 percent, which still leaves a whole lot of annoying prompts.
"From our beta and internal testing, we expect a 29% decrease in UAC prompts compared to Windows Vista," Paul Cooke, Microsoft Corp.'s director of Windows 7 client enterprise security, said last week. The UAC prompts are intended to prevent malware infections by asking the user to confirm program executions before they can take place.
Unfortunately, with Windows Vista even the most patient user was suffering from "click fatigue," according to an internal Microsoft study. While scaling back is always welcome, it's probably fair to say that users who can, will disable the prompts altogether for the good of their mental health.
In other Windows 7 news, Windows Media Player 12 ships with the Release Candidate of the operating system, and will include codec support for many popular formats out of the box. Users reportedly won't have to install an XviD codec to decode XviD video, and won't need a separate splitter installed for MP4 content. Apple QuickTime files also reportedly play with the software without any additional installations.