Disabling User Account Control (UAC) in Vista
(8 votes, average: 4.75 out of 5)
Loading ...So you’ve taken the plunge and upgraded to the new Windows Vista operating system and you’re trying to make yourself at home in this new operating system. Everything is good but every time you turn around you’re seeing a dialog that “Windows needs your permission to continue”. You’re thinking to yourself, “I just performed the action. Wasn’t that enough permission?”
That’s the new User Account Control or UAC and you’re probably wondering how in the heck you can make it go away. Stay tuned and learn how to disable UAC.
User Account Control in Windows Vista improves the safety and security of your computer by preventing potentially dangerous software from making changes to your computer without your explicit consent.” Microsoft.com.1
Like each of its predecessors Windows Vista has introduced a number of new features geared toward making your PC more secure. One of those is known as User Account Control or UAC. In previous versions of Windows, new users were typically members of the Local Administrators group because administrator privileges were required to install, update, and run many types of software without conflicts. This opened the door to many security problems because installed software and users were able to make unwanted system wide changes.
UAC attempts to prevent that by warning the user any time they, or their software, try to perform an action that could result in a system wide change by requiring that proper credentials are supplied before continuing with the operation.
While UAC’s intentions are good, some system administrators and more experienced users will probably find it more of a nuisance after seeing this dialog a few dozen times. For that reason, many users are electing to disable UAC altogether. I’ll show you how to do that at the end of this article, but first, let me show you ways of customizing it so that it becomes less of a nuisance while still allowing it to protect your system the way it was intended.
Footnotes:
Related Posts:
Recent Articles 
July 18th, 2007 at 12:17 am
Excellent article
Really makes vista much more user friendly
December 18th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Definitely a very helpful article. UAC was becoming a nuisance but I didn’t want to get rid of it altogether. This article gives a wonderful alternative for keeping your computer secure.
December 18th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Thanks for the comments. It’s always better to customize security rather than remove it.