Gadgetory

if you're a Windows user you've probably seen that message pop up a fair number of times perhaps right when you're about to load up one of your favorite games web browsers or other programs but why does Windows insist on bothering you like this I mean you clicked on the program you obviously want it to run don't you well it turns out this is actually a rather important feature and I'm not talking about something Microsoft wants you to think is important it's called user account control or UAC and believe it or not it can save you a ton of headaches you see back in the days when we were running older versions of Windows up to and including XP the operating system would just run a program when the user asked it to and while this seems like the way things should be it was actually a massive security hole by default all programs were given privileges by Windows and I don't mean like a little bit of extra RAM for being well-behaved but rather programs could essentially run whatever code they wanted after they were started now often times this wouldn't cause any problems if an innocuous program like a word processor was behaving properly the issue is that this also meant that a poorly coded malfunctioning or even malicious program could cause serious problems by making changes to the operating system so starting with Windows Vista Microsoft took away privileges from programs that weren't an integral part of the OS and started directly asking users if they wanted to allow a program to make any changes instead of just letting it happen without any input and although many features included in Vista were ill-conceived and later scrapped user account control ended up sticking around the most obvious benefit of UAC is that if a malicious program tries to mess with your system you'll get a pop-up before it can make any changes which you can use to deny it access but many other things can result in Windows saying to a program just what do you think you're doing and asking for your approval so installing drivers altering many system-wide settings defragmenting a hard drive or even changing the contents of a folder that the operating system protects like program files will raise the suspicion of Windows and cause a UAC prompt to appear asking for administrator privileges so these are the privileges that we talked about a few minutes ago that older versions of Windows just gave out like candy and another feature of UAC called virtualization even create special virtual folders for programs without administrator privileges if they try to write to an actual protected folder like Program Files to prevent important applications from getting corrupted so it's not surprising that when you try to install new software you might see a UAC prompt or even two since program installers often have to make changes to files and settings that Windows considers sensitive and if you're setting up a new PC well it can be annoying since you probably have a lot of applications drivers and I mean even hardware to install so like we get it and it's especially irritating to deal with UAC when you're opening or installing programs but we definitely recommend against disabling it doing this could allow malware to run in the background completely undetected and besides many modern programs are now written with UAC in mind and don't just assume that Windows will give them administrator privileges so it's becoming more and more common to see programs that will run just fine without UAC approval the most important thing though is if you do leave it enabled make sure you're actually using it leaving it on only to just click yes every single time without reading the prompt isn't going to help you much it's kind of like getting a smart video doorbell and then just buzzing in the crazed looking guy with the knife speaking of knives don't cut away from this video before I tell you about our sponsor if you've ever been in the need for a quick video clip for b-roll or an After Effects template or motion background check out story blocks we've used them here on tech quickie and it's really simplified our workflow clips aren't easy to find and you can download as many clips as you want at a low cost to test in your project whether it's a YouTube video or a video background for your website so instead of letting your creative needs take a backseat due to budget constraints or scrambling because a client made a last-minute change use story blocks is affordable high quality footage rather than like going and trying to find someone to shoot it for you we're gonna have them linked in the video description so thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible and don't forget to subscribe it's like really really important the most important thing you'll do today unless you brush your teeth oral hygiene is very important