How to Turn Off User Account Control (UAC) in Windows Vista

The UAC is a great piece of technology and a very useful safety feature. UAC is designed to stop viruses or Trojans from running automatically on your computer. It does this by requesting you to allow or deny the activity of a program as it tries to launch. This is a new feature introduced with Windows Vista. Windows XP and earlier versions do not contain UAC and are therefore considered to be less secure.

If, however you are very familiar with the system, or you complete a reinstallation, then the constant demands will be incredibly annoying.

To turn UAC off, there are two possibilities:

1) Disable UAC globally:

"msconfig" call (Start -> Run or directly into the search box type)

In the category "tools" find the entry "disable user account protection" Uncheck this box and click OK. Once you make any changes here the system has to be restarted in order for it to come into effect.

2) Disable UAC Pop-ups:

In the Start menu search box "secpol.msc" and press Enter

Now in the left window in "Local Policies", click "Security Options"

Then in the right pane "User Account Control:..." Double-click and select the option on "Increased rights without prompt" and select OK.

Alternatively, you can change it directly in the registry.

Windows Vista Home edition users can only do this way because there is no

Group Policies in that version.

Enter this key into the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ Software \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Policies \ System

ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin

And assign a value of "0".

You will now have to restart for the changes to take effect.

Result

The security warning when you start programs will not pop-up. Nevertheless, there is a subtle difference between the two methods listed above:

For Variant 1, Internet Explorer no longer runs in protected mode.

For Variant 2, on the other hand, all the programs continue with normal user rights and also running Internet Explorer remains in protected mode.

Once a program requests administrator rights, they are automatically assigned.

I do not recommend permanently disabling UAC. It is only a few extra clicks, and the gain in security is big. If you MUST turn it off, then I certainly recommend going with option 2 above.