A couple generic Windows 7 questions

[phide]

I felt compelled to pick some brains today, so I have two questions:

1) I'd like to be able to turn my display off via a hot corner or keyboard shortcut while the desktop is locked or, alternatively, have the display turn off after a specified amount of time elapses upon locking the desktop. Is this possible? If it requires a background process to be running, that's fine, though I would prefer a solution that's portable (i.e. doesn't need to be installed).

My display is set to turn itself off after 10 minutes of inactivity, but it seems pretty silly to have it be on for ten minutes after I've locked the desktop as well.

2) What are the potential security ramifications of running Windows 7 on a day-to-day basis as "administrator" as opposed to as a limited user when UAC is left at its default level or elevated to its highest level? Any?

 

[Bahamut]

1) Wizmo can do a lot of stuff including turning off the display/monitor with a keyboard shortcut. Luckily, my Dell Laptop does that anyway with Fn+D so, definitely a huge saver of power on my laptop whenever I'm not actively doing anything. I just hit Fn+D and it's off, any keys or mouse movement bring it back. But Wizmo kicks ass and allows for keyboard control of a LOT of stuff... guess I should have added that to the "Free software" thread in the past, which I'll do after I finish this post.

The one issue you might encounter is that you're trying to use a keyboard shortcut to disable the display after you've locked the machine which might not work right. If you turn off the display and then lock the Desktop, the process of doing the locking is most likely going to trigger the display back on, but Wizmo should be able to address that - it's not turning it off like a screensaver as I understand it.

There's also:

http://www.tothepc.com/archives/turn-off-monitor-display-with-keyboard-shortcut/

and several other similar tools. Wizmo takes a bit to set it up, but what it's capable of when you really get into it is pretty amazing. Check out the Wizmo user groups/forums for more tips and tricks as well.

2) Uhmmm... nothing to worry about I'd say as long as you don't do anything stupid like disable UAC at the same time. As long as UAC is up and functional, running as "Administrator" has no effect because there is no real Admin account in Windows 7 anymore. It's impossible to have the "God-like power" of pre-Vista/Windows 7 versions of Windows with an Admin account. As long as UAC is functional, you're not going to get much more "secure" than that.

 

[phide]

Looks like Monitor Off Utility fits the bill perfectly, being able to turn off the display and lock the desktop with a single keyboard shortcut. Beautiful.

Regarding administrator access, that was my understanding, but is there a list or functions or capabilities "administrators" have that users do not or are administrator and user accounts in 7 functionally equivalent?

 

[Bahamut]

There are only User accounts in Vista and Windows 7 anymore, the "Administrator" account really doesn't exist as I mentioned. All accounts are User level accounts and will request privilege escalation as required on a per-case-basis, and by case I mean each time it's necessary, as long as UAC is left at the default setting or even the maximal one..., that is. It is possible to disable UAC and then have "God-like" power to ruin the damned system completely, but that's just a similar thing - it's not actually an Administrator or root-level account even so, still just a User account but with the ability to completely pooch the whole thing.

It's similar - in principle, so don't hassle me for saying it - to running Linux as a regular user and most anytime you need to do something that could alter the system itself you'll be asked for the root password. In principle, it works identically in Vista/Windows 7 with one caveat: it's not asking for a password, just a click so, that's been the cause of many a debate over the usefulness or the haphazard implementation of UAC in Windows.

The argument is that requiring someone to type a password is far more secure than just a click and that does have some merit but, Windows isn't Linux/UNIX/OSX/etc so, they've done the best they can without forcing people to type passwords over and over as you do on those OSes each time you require privilege escalation. It's a trade-off but it works, for the most part.

Regardless of what Linux/UNIX/OSX/etc diehards say, things are better from a security perspective than they were in previous versions of Windows. No, it's not perfect, but then again no OS will ever be perfect...