That's just the tip of the iceberg, too. Everywhere you turn there are welcome security protections in Vista. It's by far and away the overriding theme of this version of the operating system. Even so, two questions remain: Will Microsoft exact too high a price on the end-user experience in targeting its worthy security goals? Has Microsoft gone far enough to make Windows Vista able to withstand the onslaught of threats?

UAC and you

If Vista Beta 2 were the final version of Vista, the answer to that first question -- has Microsoft gone too far -- would be: Yes. Happily, Microsoft still has another six months to perfect User Account Control (UAC). I'm on record as saying that numerous, repetitive user prompts are the wrong tactic to employ in the security war. If they occur infrequently the way they do on a Macintosh, that would be acceptable.

In recent years, some in the security community have publicly asserted that repetitive pop-up warning dialogs desensitize users to possible threats, especially when they don't understand the threats. So it's not just that numerous confirmation prompts are annoying. It's that as it exists today, UAC would train millions of Windows users to click OK without thinking about it. And that is definitely not the desired effect.

We should learn a lot more about this with the next pre-release version of Vista, Release Candidate 1, which will likely arrive in the near future. (At press time, Microsoft was not offering any information about RC1's expected release date, but the July to August time frame is a good guess.)