These are some quick notes from a session on UAC by Paul A. Cooke, Tech-Ed EMEA 2008:

Microsoft Windows 7 will reduce the number of OS applications and tasks, that require elevation – this has been done by re-factoring apps and tasks into elevated and non-elevated pieces.

UAC v2 will provide a more flexible prompt behavior for administrators, also administrators will see less UAC elevation prompts.

Users can do even more as standard user (eg. parts of Bitlocker, Windows Update etc.), they will also be able to ‘read’ system settings without needing to elevate.

Windows 7 will be better spotting human vs. application changes, this way “human administrator” changes will be allowed without too many prompts.

UAC can now easily be graduated into 4 levels (from the strict Vista default to totally off) - everything can of course be handled using group policy.

 

To me this is all pretty cool – but to be honest, I’m one of those weird guys, who don’t care about Vista UAC prompts… I just press ALT+C… How hard can it be? ;-)

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Nicholas Rayner pointed out (via Twitter linking back to his blog) a new article available for download on Microsoft.com looking at 5 misunderstood features in Windows Vista today.

Download: 5 Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista

Those 5 misunderstood features include:

• User Account Control (UAC)
• Image Management
• Display Driver Model
• Windows Search
• 64-bit architecture

The article looks to clear up some confusion IT Pros might have with these features. This article is part of the Springboard Series on TechNet offering a collection of resources, tools, and monthly articles to address your questions on Windows Vista based on community feedback and feedback from early adopters.

We blogged about a Springboard Series Live Roundtable event in February in which Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich took part of addressing Windows Vista Deployment and Adoption. You can watch the recording of the session here.

Thanks Nick (a.k.a "aussienick") for pointing this out!

Many people think Windows Defender as a waste and its true ;).I have seen any people searching ways to disable/remove/uninstall Windows Defender from there system.There are two ways you can do this :

Through Windows Defender:

1.Open Windows Defender.2.Click on tools>option>Scroll down to Administrator options.
3.Uncheck Windows Defender and Save.Click Continue if UAC prompts

Through services.msc

More at {Hacks} Daily

Windows Vista Multilingual User Interface Pack (MUI) is language packs for Windows Vista that provide a translated version of most of the user interface so that users can change the display language on Vista computer and view wizards, dialog boxes, menus, Help topics, and other items in Windows in a different language.

Select and download your Vista Ultimate x86 x64 MUI Language Pack

Download : Vista MUI Tools v5.5 (x86 & x64)

Logout and login again using administrator user account, and with UAC turned off.
Administrator account is disabled by default in all clean installations and upgrades of Windows Vista.
UAC is enabled by default.

• Enable/Disable Built-in Administrator Account in Windows Vista

• Disable/Enable User Account Control

• Change Language Manually:

1. Run Registry Editor (regedit.exe).

2. Navigate to the following registry key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\MUI\UILanguages\xx-YY

Where xx-YY is the original system user interface language locale string, such as en-US for English edition.

3. Rename the xx-YY to aa-BB, where aa-BB is the locale string for the new system language that you want to set

(such as de-DE for German), so that the registry key looks like below:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\MUI\UILanguages\aa-BB

4. Inside the renamed aa-BB registry key, create a new “String” value in the right pane, and name the new value data as DefaultFallback.

5. Assign the “DefaultFallback” with value of xx-YY (the original language).

During the betas, one of the few new functionality Windows Vista Service Pack 1 added was the ability to create a Windows recovery CD with an easy-to-use GUI interface. Up and until then, it was slightly harder but still possible to do so through a command line. Update: To avoid confusion, this is not the type of recovery discs you find in prepackaged computer systems. This recovery disc does not reinstall Windows, it merely offers tools to fix it if it ever becomes unbootable.

For unknown reasons, the functionality was then pulled out of the final release of SP1. If you look inside your system files, you can still find recdisc.exe which is the utility’s executable, but clicking on it does not launch anything. The shortcut in the Start Menu was also removed, indicating it was removed on purpose.

Out of curiosity, Long Zheng (from where I got this article) decided to find out if by copying a version of recdisc.exe from a beta build of Vista SP1 and placing it in SP1 RTM would work. Thanks to Chris123NT for digging up a copy, it did work. If you also want to make it work, there’s a bit of file permissions involved, so here’s how.

Step 1. Download a pre-final release of recdisc.exe (x86 version) or (x64 version).
Step 2. Open your system32 directory. Start menu, type “%systemroot%\system32? and click Enter.
Step 3. Find recdisc.exe, right click on it and click “Properties”.

Step 4. Select the “Security” tab and click “Advanced”.
Step 5. Select the “Owner” tab and click “Edit…”.

Step 6. Select “Administrators” to change the owner to, click “OK”. Click “OK” again on the dialog.
Step 7. You should be back at the file security settings dialog. Click “Edit..”.

Step 8. Select “Administrators” and then tick the checkbox under the “Allow” column and “Full control” row. Then click “OK”. Click “OK” again to finish.
Step 9. Rename this file (press F2) to something like “recdisc.old” to keep a backup of the original file in case you need to restore it in the future.

Step 10. Copy the “recdisc.exe” file you downloaded earlier. Double click on it to run.

Via [ istartedsomething]

Windows Vista has a new syntax for opening Control Panel item through command line.
Say if you want to open Default Programs panel you could run the below given command from either the command line or the start menu search box:

control.exe /name Microsoft.DateAndTime

There are many names,but some few are given below

Microsoft.Personalization
Microsoft.AdministrativeTools
Microsoft.UserAccounts
Microsoft.WindowsUpdate
Microsoft.WelcomeCenter
Microsoft.AddHardware
Microsoft.PowerOptions
Microsoft.BitLockerDriveEncryption
Microsoft.DateAndTime
Microsoft.DefaultPrograms
Microsoft.DeviceManager
Microsoft.SecurityCenter
Microsoft.FolderOptions
Microsoft.WindowsDefender
Microsoft.WindowsFirewall
Microsoft.ParentalControls