Windows Vista User Access Control
Posted by decipherinfosys on February 3, 2007
The more you work with Windows Vista, the more you will experience the many popup messages generated by the new User Access Control (UAC) feature.
What is UAC?
UAC is the new Microsoft watchdog that minimizes the amount of privileges a user has while logged in with their profile. Each time an activity is attempted that requires elevated privileges, like installing a piece of 3rd party software or accessing the Group Policy editor for example, a message appears informing the user that “Windows needs your permission to continue”. At this point the user has the option to either Continue or Cancel as shown below:
Can I Disable UAC?
It is safe to assume that 99% of us will always want to continue, and being constantly interrupted by messages that you have to take time to click past can be frustrating and a waste of time. So, this obviously begs the question of whether or not UAC can be disabled. Fortunately the answer is “Yes”. UAC can be disabled via the User Accounts Control Panel. Simply navigate to Control Panel -> User Accounts, and then click on the User Accounts icon. This brings you to the ‘Make changes to your user account’ screen as shown below:
Then you need to select the bottom option – ‘Turn User Account Control on or off’, ironically, the next thing that you will see is a UAC pop-up message 
. Once past the pop-up all that is left is to uncheck the checkbox in the following screen:
Lastly, you will need to reboot the system for the change to take affect….old habits are indeed very hard to break!
Now, the above solution is appropriate for experienced administrators, but not a good idea for the average user. A better option is to use the local security settings provided by the MMC Administrative Tools console. Under Local Policies -> Security Options there are numerous UAC configuration options. For example, administrators can specify that elevated privileges be automatically allowed. This does not turn UAC off completely, but it does prevent a majority of the UAC pop-up messages.
