I was pretty excited to try out Microsoft’s new "personal cloud" computing initiative - Live Mesh.  I signed up right away and it looks great and offers some very neat features.  Yet I have one problem with it, and that’s an unfortunate tie with Vista that makes one or the other virtually unusable.

Live Mesh, for some reason unknown to me, requires that User Account Control to be turned on.  Vista users will know User Account Control (UAC) as an annoyance that comes turned on by default.  It prevents unauthorized and potentially dangerous changes from being made without an Administrator’s approval, which I concede might be beneficial in some circumstances (a classroom?) but is incredibly annoying if you are used to being the Administrator yourself.  In that case all it does it pop up a regular stream of annoying modal warnings, to which you become accustomed to clicking through without reading in about 10 minutes, thereby rendering any protection useless.

But it’s worse, these warnings actually prevent you from doing useful work when you really want to.  Like renewing your IP address.  Or adding or removing files in the Program Files folder - if you’re editing them through an IDE, you don’t even get the warnings, skipping directly to failure.  You might have to reorganize your file system a bit to work around UAC.  And some stuff simply doesn’t work.  I could not under any circumstances get Adobe Flash 9 to install for me under UAC.

You can see I’m an anti-fan of this non-feature of Vista, which promises security but provides no real benefit and quite a number of headaches.

I don’t really understand why UAC would be required to run Live Mesh, but how important could it be if I can run Live Mesh on Windows XP, which has no such concept?  Is this just a UAC marketing?

In any case the effect is that a serious Vista user (the kind who might be an early adopter of Mesh) is significantly disadvantaged.  For me, the benefits of Live Mesh aren’t worth the pain inflicted by UAC, and I’ll generally restrict my Mesh use to non-Vista platforms, or extraordinary circumstances where it’s worth doing a reboot to access the Mesh.  What a shame.