|
DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A
April 20,
2008
Q.
I find that Vista's UAC is a big annoyance
that I don't need. Is there a way to disable
it?
A.
Yes, there is a way that is built into
Vista, but since disabling it may defeat
some of the security breaches it was
designed to prevent. So, a brief explanation
of UAC is in order. UAC stands for User
Account Control and is described as follows:
"User Account Control (UAC) is a technology
and security infrastructure that was
introduced in Microsoft's Windows Vista
operating system. It aims to improve the
security of Microsoft Windows by limiting
application software to standard user
privileges until an administrator authorizes
an increase in privilege level. In this way,
only applications that the user trusts
receive higher privileges, and malware is
kept from receiving the privileges necessary
to compromise the operating system. In other
words, a user account may have administrator
privileges assigned to it, but applications
that the user runs do not also have those
privileges unless they are approved
beforehand or the user explicitly authorizes
it to have higher privileges."
When the
UAC dialog is displayed, all functions of
the computer are temporarily disabled, the
screen is dimmed, and the only active
function is the UAC dialog. Therefore, it is
not feasible to get a screen shot of this
dialog so I had to take pictures of the
monitor. The Administrator User UAC warning
looks like this:
The Standard User UAC warning looks like
this:
Note here
that Vista's Standard User is about
equivalent to XP's Limited User, but with a
little more accessibility.
Since
this UAC dialog is displayed for just about
every possible change, even something as
simple as changing the clock setting which
was used for the above examples, it could
become habit to just click OK without paying
it any real attention. Therefore, for
someone that is careful and totally
cognizant of what they are doing, it may
become nothing more than an annoyance.
UAC can
be disabled using the built in method of
Vista for either an Administrator or
Standard user account. To do it this way,
open the Control Panel, select User
Accounts, then click on "Turn User Account
Control on or off". After making the change,
a re-start of Vista is necessary. There will
be a warning displayed in the system tray
about UAC being turned off. To turn it back
on, you can click on the icon in the system
tray, or go back to the User access in the
Control Panel.
As an
alternate method to disable the UAC if
signed on as an administrator, I have
written a little applet that will do it
without a required re-start of Vista.
Another advantage of using this applet is
that there will be no warning message
displayed in the system tray if you have
Vista Service pack #1 installed. So, to
re-enable UAC I have also written a little
applet to turn it back on. There is also one
that will toggle it between enabled and
disabled. These applets can
be downloaded from the "Downloads" section
of this site. They are called "DisableUAC.exe", EnableUAC.exe",
and ToggleUAC.exe.
|
