Microsoft wants us all to understand Vista so the company posted an article to its website entitled "Five Misunderstood Features in Windows Vista" but said article is no longer available.  So, I guess it doesn’t want us to "understand" Vista at all.

While the article was available features such as UAC (User Account Control), Image Management and the Display Driver model were listed as being "misunderstood."  The company said that those features caused "confusion" and "slow Windows Vista adoption" for most users.

According to IDG it’s not clear why the document was removed and the company wasn’t willing to discuss the document.

UAC is by far one of the most annoying features of Vista.  The document (which is no longer available) said that UAC was "dispersed throughout the OS and designed to protect the system in a variety of ways, not just one feature that can be controlled in an isolated way."

That’s not the problem, the problem is that even mundane tasks may prompt a UAC dialog which distracts users from their work.  Software originally written for Windows XP that is installed on Vista may have a problem with the new environment.

Windows XP software was designed and written to work with full administrator rights so under Vista a user may not have those rights and will be prompted with a UAC dialog and asked to enter a password.

It’s up to developers to design software that runs normally with "standard" user permissions and this is slowly beginning to happen.  Until everything is like that either turn UAC off or use TweakUAC to disable parts of it.

Update: Microsoft’s public relations has contacted us and alerted us that the original document has been taken down to correct “a few inaccuracies [Microsoft] thought needed correction.”

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Related:

Microsoft re-releases misunderstood Vista features document

Where, oh where is Vista SP1?

Department of Justice forcing Microsoft to release Vista SP1 this year

Microsoft might forget about Vista SP1 until 2008

Two (possible) SP1 updates released for Vista

Entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 9:59 am under Microsoft, Uncategorized, Vista.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.