
Originally Posted by
scaryjim
As long as you've got User Account Control enabled there's no problem running Windows 7 as an account with Administrator priveleges: you automatically run in a lowered permission state then, when a process needs to ask for admin permissions, you just have to click OK in a dialog box. Windows 7 also has levels of UAC (rather than Vista's on or off) so you can control how often you get asked to elevate permissions. I use UAC on all my Windows boxes and only ever get asked for permission to continue when I'm installing new software, which makes sense.
The only thing to be aware of is that a lot of old programs that don't understand UAC will behave differently depending on whether you launch them as Admin or as user, which can mean things like losing all progress in saved games.
Big Fish Games is / are particularly bad for this: the number of times my kids have played a game for a couple of hours, shut down, and next time they've come back to the computer their progress has been squirrelled away somewhere obscure and they've had to start again is just ridiculous...