It seems that a lot of people do not like Windows Vista UAC’s. While UAC looks and feels a lot like sudo in Debian Linux (e.g. Ubuntu), it behaves quite differently than sudo. And unlike the security implementations in Linux, the Windows Vista implementation seems more like an afterthought.

For example, if you try to edit hosts file located in C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc, you get this error message when you try to save the changes even if you have an admin account:

"Cannot create the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts file." Make sure that the path and file name are correct.

This message gives you the impression that somehow the path you gave was not correct even though the underlying problem is that you needed to run as an Administrator.

Unfortunately, here you do not get the UAC prompt and you wouldn’t be able to save any changes unless you do a Run As Administrator when opening the notepad(See the following Microsoft Knowledge Base article for more information). So it seems that we get prompted for UAC confirmation all the time when we really do not need it and yet it fails us when we do need it like in this case…