If you are using a laptop, and it is sluggish than what you expect, the power settings may help. There’s another thing to look out for though - it may not be Vista’s fault. Check your graphics card specialized control panel (nvida, ati, whatever) and see whether they have their own power savings too. That one would definitely impact your laptop’s speed, from my personal experience and which is true if you are playing games or have numerous windows.
The reason that Vista implements UAC is because it’s a security best practice: thou shalt not use an Administrator as your usual account. Other OSs have similar mechanisms. The rationale being that if you have admin privileges, so does anything you do – even if it’s not something you want to do, like running a virus or trojan. If you try to click on a video link and Vista pops up a dialog warning you that you’re trying to modify a system file, for instance, it’s a good bet that it’s a malicious link, and not the video you thought you were trying to see.
The problem is, in Vista, if you are not set as Administrator, you can’t use some programs. At all. Being completely unable to use a program you have because you are not the Administrator, even if you are, is not a benefit. It is at best, an annoyance.
Yeah, like Alcohol 120% Sorry, but why the fuck do I need administrator privileges to burn a CD? That’s what “run as administrator” is for, though.
Because, to burn a disk, the program you are running has to have direct access to the hardware. A badly written disk-burning program could completely destroy your drive.
On home computers, UAC is usually to prevent malicious or badly written programs from screwing up your computer. Even on XP, the most common viruses and spyware require administrator privileges to infect your computer.
I think an approved programs list would be more beneficial, though. For example, it could explicitly allow you (and only you, not another program) to run Alcohol 120%, but not let another program touch your burner. But this would have to be very securely implemented, with only an administrator being allowed to change the list.
I’ve never been able to notice much of a difference between High Performance and Balanced.
But–again, because this is MPSIMS–I have to mention that the biggest problem with the OS, in my opinion, is the memory it uses. More specifically, it wasn’t uncommon up to a couple of years ago for new notebooks to be shipped running Vista on a measly .5G. Such was the case with my old computer; since then I’ve upped the memory to 2.0G and it’s made a world of difference for the infrequent occasions on which I still use it.
On some machines you can go into the system BIOS at start up and disable the processor speed / power saving options. Something like C1 Control and EIST Control. That turns the slow-down feature off at processor level so it’s always running at full speed.