Vista UAC (User Account Control) - How to kill the monster

Note: UAC is a security feature and disabling it will reduce the security of your system.

Vista UAC popups can be very irritating for most users. It has been annoying to the point where it can be seen as one of the biggest causes of frustrations and criticism towards the operating system. Thankfully there is an option that most users will easily find to turn it off but is this really the best way to kill the monster?

Here are some ways to avoid the annoyance caused by Vista's UAC:

1. Don't buy Vista and wait for Windows 7 and cross your fingers and hope it doesn't have the same thing.
2. Never upgrade your windows.
3. Switch operating systems.
4. Go outside.
5. Turn it off.
6. Tell it to auto allow.

Here we will explore 5 and 6, mostly because 4 is unreasonable and the rest are filler.

Option 5 - Turn it off completely
UAC can be turned off completely! No more alerts at all!
This can be done in the following manner.

• Open the control panel
• Open User accounts
• Make sure you are on your user page.
• Click "Turn User Account Control on or off"
• Deselect "Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer"
• Click ok.

Why would you not want to do this??
You lose the security benefits of UAC! With UAC anytime that a program is run that requires Administrator privileges it asks you if you want to give it to the program. This can be an advantage if you can't be trusted, but it's very annoying when running as the administrator. Another benefit of leaving it on is that it allows guest accounts to access these tools if they know an administrators user name and password. This makes troubleshooting guest accounts much easier to do since you can do it form within the account itself. There are also some programs that reportedly do not work properly or at all without UAC in place!

So you don't want the notification and still want some of the hidden protection it offers and want those programs to still work you say?

This leads to:

Option 6 - Tell it to auto allow.

Vista Home Basic and Home Premium editions will not be able to turn off UAC using the following method as they do not have "Local Security Policy" in the Administrative tools. There is a way to enable it in Vista Home Premium by editing a registry key, but since it can compromise security and is risky I will not cover it here.

• Open the control panel
• Change it to Classic View
• Open "Administrative Tools"
• Open "Local Security Policy"
• Expand on the left "Local Policies"
• Click "Security Options" in the left pane
• In the right area scroll down to "User Account Control: Behaviour of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode."
• Change from the default "Prompt for consent" to "Elevate without prompting"

You will most likely need to fiddle with the Local Security policy window to be able to read the entries. It can take while to load so be patient.

What this does is keeps UAC in place and continues to annoy users who aren't classified as Administrator with the popups but gets rid of it for all administrator accounts. To also get rid of it for typical users there is another entry that can be changed. Right below the last entry there is:
"User Account Control: Behaviour of the elevation prompt for standard users."
You can leave it at "Prompt for credentials" which asks for admin user name and password when needed or "Automatically deny elevation requests" which does exactly what it states.

Hope this helps some of you out! :D