Review : Smart UAC Replacement

Work By WinVistaClub Licensed Under CCA

Smart UAC Replacement ... To use Or Not To Use ...

...That is the question !

Smart UAC Replacement 1.0 which was recently updated/released looks like one great product for Vista. In fact it answers most Vista users gripe that Microsoft should have kept an 'Always allow/deny for this program' checkbox option in the UAC prompts.

The program 'replaces' the UAC and turns the standard UAC into "silent" mode.

The following are some of the features enumerated on its website:

Smart UAC Replacement will determine automatically, according to its settings, if the certain program's action can be allowed or not. Tracking harmful and suspicious processes allows Smart UAC Replacement to find unknown malicious programs and prevent their activity. Smart UAC Replacement prevents operating system damage by restricting access to essential parts of computer to potentially malicious programs. Simplifies PC protection by automatically detecting unknown malicious programs via extensive database. Monitors and stops rootkit programs.

Since it looked good, I decided to try it out but was unable to do so as on 3 different occasions my Vista crashed with INVALID_KERNEL_HANDLE BSOD error. While uninstalling the product I did give the publishers this feedback. However there are many who have installed and are using this program successfully.

Digging around a bit I came across the following facts !

The developers of Smart UAC Replacement are Security Stronghold.
In the About Company page of their website, it says:
Security Stronghold company was founded in 2004 by three computer security professionals. Since then Security Stronghold has released four best selling products (True Sword, Active Shield, Security Suite, Registry Cleaner) which help users all over the world to successfully fight with spyware, adware, viruses, trojans and privacy breakers. Our fifth product - Smart UAC Replacement - was developed to help Windows Vista users get rid of irritating User Account Control alerts while raising the overall level of computer protection up to new height. We combined five years of computer security experience with one year of development to bring you this state of art product which will make your work and entertainment really pleasant. With help of Smart UAC Replacement you don't need to worry of your computer security anymore.

Here is what Symantec says about TrueSword:
TrueSword is a Security Risk that may give exaggerated reports of threats on the computer. The program then prompts the user to purchase a registered version of the software in order to remove the reported threats.

However Spywarrior has de listed it as a Rogue:
Note on TrueSword: TrueSword was listed on this page because of concerns with false positives. Testing with the latest version of the program indicates that the problems with earlier versions have been satisfactorily resolved. Thus, we can no longer consider TrueSword to be "rogue/suspect" anti-spyware.

So I am back to where I started !

Smart UAC Replacement ... To use Or Not To Use...

...That is the question !

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