Microsoft Claims Vista UAC Is 'Misunderstood'

"You want people to think about what they're doing. In XP, people would tend to go into autopilot mode and start clicking 'yes,' 'yes,' 'yes,' and before they knew it, they'd trashed their machine," said Marc Harrison, president of Silicon East, a Manalapan, N.J.-based solution provider.

"We don't see the dozens of security pop-ups a day that people talk about. For machines that are configured properly, they're few and far between," Harrison said. "When you do get pop-up, it's when you're about to install or delete, or do something that takes more thought and expertise than a typical user might have."

Internet Explorer 7's protected mode, which is akin to UAC for the Web browser, is another source of incompatibilities between Vista and third party line of business applications, according to Microsoft.

Vista represents a significant evolutionary step beyond XP, so there are going to be aspects of it that are going to seem annoying," said Chris Labatt-Simon, president and CEO of D&D Consulting, an Albany, N.Y.-based solution provider.

"However, once third party vendors start writing their software and hardware drivers to support Vista controls, people will realize that these annoyances are actually progressive," said Labatt-Simon.

"Line of business applications haven't been updated to the Vista architectural standard, and hardware manufacturers haven't updated their drivers, so customers are hesitant to move to the platform," said Nitrio.

"The platform shift from XP to Vista is something that third party vendors should have been involved with from the design stage of Vista, but it's expensive to adapt your hardware or software to someone else's standard," added Nitrio.

Microsoft also claims that the notion that Vista runs slower than XP on identical PCs is a fallacy, and exists because Vista works harder and contains more features and functionality than previous versions of Windows. In the document, Microsoft offers a somewhat convoluted explanation for why this is so.

While a search application would consume more processing power during peak loads -- for example when copying a large number of files -- the search service has "far less impact on available computing resources," but takes "a bit more time" to complete these types of tasks, Microsoft noted.

"On machines configured with the appropriate specifications for their operating system, the speed of most operations and tasks between Windows Vista and Windows XP is virtually on parity," Microsoft said in the document.