I really do like Windows Vista. It’s pretty and feels well-designed under the hood. I do, however, have two main issues with it: System Restore (SR) and the User Account Control (UAC).

In both cases, your only option is to turn them on or off and both “features” are annoying as all hell when turned on.

System Restore has no configurable options (in XP you were able to specify the % of disk space you wanted it to use) and in the past for me, Vista’s SR has decided to steal over 80GB of space. I’ll admit, I spent an entire night in distress, wondering where all the space had gone before eventually realizing SR had gobbled it all up. Turning SR off recovered every missing GB. Ryan’s recently had Vista’s SR waste over 200 GB of room on his PC. Ridiculous.

UAC is just annoying as hell. I’m sure you’ve seen the Mac-PC ad:

It pops up for almost everything and once again, there’s no configuration options. Just off or on.

Now, I recognize it’s purpose and I’d say that it might work well for someone like my mother who very rarely installs programs on her own and doesn’t do anything remotely advanced or behind the scenes on her PC. For my own use though, it’s maddening. I can’t even edit game config files (or anything within the Program Files subdirectories) without having to give permission, usually multiple times. So I turn it off, missing out on any possible security advantage it might have given.

I want to be able to customize and configure both these features so I can leave them on without having them drive me crazy. Isn’t one of the big draws of the PC its highly configurable nature? So enthusiasts who want to get their hands dirty under the hood can tweak things so they run just the way they want them?

Seriously, System Restore should include at least two options: Allow users to specify the number of System Restore Points to save, and/or the volume of disk space SR’s allowed to use. Maybe even set a time limit of how long to keep Restore Points saved?

To improve UAC: A big checklist of the types of occurrences where it pops to ask for confirmation would be pretty damn nice. Allow users to select which things they actually want to have confirmed.

Then I wouldn’t have to click through two confirmation dialogues when I’m just trying to move a screenshot image out of my Team Fortress 2 folder.