There's no way in Vista Beta 2 to access the Administrator account (at least, not that I could find). Why? Presumably because Microsoft wants to force the issue and require beta testers to work within the constraints of User Access Controls.

Of course, it is possible to turn off User Account Controls. It's what's behind the "Change security settings" option on the opening page of the User Accounts Control Panel. Making it impossible to turn off this feature, without hiding the Administrator log-in, would have been a better choice. I've already seen error messages to the effect that I don't have sufficient user privileges to perform that action about 19 times.

This only heightens the mistake Microsoft may be making in differentiating the Administrator and other computer-administrator-level accounts. While this makes sense from a security perspective, Windows already has an overly complex arrangement of permissions and permissions inheritance. The potential to either prevent you from doing something you have to do to make your system survive, or for users to fiddle with object rights and thereby inadvertently leave their systems vulnerable, is just too great. A complete revision and simplification of object permissions is long overdue for Windows.

15. Some first-blush networking peeves.

Within the first five minutes of checking out Vista's new networking functionality, the first two things you may notice are: