How to disable UAC
Thu, 02/22/2007 - 10:37 — Ciprian
UAC or User Access Control is a new feature of Windows Vista that is meant to enhance the security of your system. Each time an application is installed or whenever an important system change is made by the user or by a running process, the screen is blacked out and temporarily disabled and a dialog is shown with the choices to allow or deny the action.
If the logged user is not an administrator, Windows Vista will also ask for the administrator password. While this helps keeping your system safer from threats, it can also be very annoying and sometimes confusing.
In this guide we will show you how to disable this feature of Windows Vista. Before we start, we must remind you that disabling UAC is not recommended by Microsoft because it can expose you to a lot more security threats. If you still choose to disable it please make sure you have proper security in place for your system.
To disable the UAC, enter the Control Panel and type UAC in the search box.
The first result returned by the search will be User Accounts – Turn User Account Control (UAC) on or off.
Click on it and the UAC window will open. Deselect the option Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer and press the OK button.
Windows Vista will ask you to restart your computer. After the restart, UAC will be disabled and all the confirmation requests will no longer bug you.
Related articles:
Have a better UAC experience with Norton User Account Control
Disable User Account Control (UAC) for certain Windows Vista applications
Tweak the User Account Control (UAC)
Manage User Accounts
Windows Vista Security Center
Recommended articles:
Windows 7: What is UAC & Why You Should Never Turn It Off
Windows 7 vs Windows Vista: The UAC Benchmark
Running Vista Every Day! - UAC – The Good and The Bad
4 Ways to Make UAC Less Annoying on Windows Vista
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Comments
UAC
My boss has vista on his laptop and hates the UAC thing, i just tried to remove it however now some of his applications don't work so i had to add it again how do i solve this?
UAC, you can NEVER be rid of it!
I have like most of you been using windows software for years. In XP, excellent programmers have always found ways around things that get under your skin that are good for you and your computer.
This UAC thing is driving me crazy, I have done the un-checking the box to turn it off and then gone to the registry and change whatever the value is to zreo and that doesn't work either. In fact, I already had the zero in the location these fine folks talk about.
I hope very soon that someone finds the solution, even turned off I still get a balloon that pops up telling me to check my security settings. You know what it's telling, don't you? TURN ON YOUR UAC!!!
Security Center
To get rid of those balloon pop-ups, go to the Security Center and disable them.
Disabling UAC is really not that great of an idea.
UAC is actually not that intrusive unless you're running old software or software that isn't developed properly.
Rights promotion and demotion (basically what UAC does) has been a standard feature of UNIX and MacOS for years and is one of the reasons that Windows has had so many security issues over the years.
It's been my experience that once you start using a Vista machine for any extended time and have all your options configured, you're not going to see UAC that much. That is, unless you're constantly tinkering and messing with options. Which, is exactly what you want. You see, UAC makes sure that such configs and modifications are being performed by YOU and not some unauthorized application.
If you're seeing UAC everytime you're running a program, chances are you can find a new version of it that will run with standard user rights instead of running natively in administrator rights, which is bad programming.
What I ask my customers is: Does UAC really bug you that often that you want to leave your system wide open for compromise?
UAC fix for Vista
This is a lovely story - pity it has nothing to do with reality. I have been through the routines shown here several times and not enough matches to be able to make anything work.
UAC
When you disable UAC, does that mean you disabled it on every account?
UAC in vista
Does turning off UAC in vista have any implications with IE? One of our users is missing the lock symbol in his browser and I think its related to UAC.
any advise would be appreciated.
Neil
Games and admin rights
Ok I'm running 32 bit vista and for a few games when I put in the CD, eg Spore Creature Creator, nothing happens, as if there is no auto run going on. Now I've looked on forums and they say I need to give my autoruns administrative rights, is disabling UAC the same thing?
AutoPlay
No, it is not the same thing.
You need to turn on AutoPlay and configure it correctly. You can learn how to do this here:
http://www.vista4beginners.com/AutoPlay
UAC can be helpful
I hated the UAC when I first started using Vista, but I started doing alot of downloading from the internet and found that it was helpful when I would pick up something bad. As soon as the program tries to alter the registry UAC kicks in and I realize I just downloaded something bad and I immediately begin to remove it. So unless you happen to be one of the unfortunate ones that got stuck with a pentium 4 with only a half gig of ram running Vista, it really isn't that much of a problem. If your computer is slow UAC will take forever to load and can be very annoying.
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