Raymond.CC Blog

UAC stands for User Account Control, and is a new security feature of Windows Vista. Here is a typical example of an elevation prompt displayed by Vista:

That’s the first thing I noticed after trying out Windows Vista. Everything I wanted to do needs to be prompted by User Account Control. At first I was thinking what’s the point of Microsoft included this feature into Windows Vista? It only needed an extra click to get through without password. Well now I know after reading up. Since the virus infects your computer when you use it as a standard user, the virus cannot get access to the global system resources, and therefore the amount of damage it can do is severely limited. Although it still can corrupt your documents and read your email, it cannot infect Windows system files or install itself to be automatically activated everytime you login to the computer. If a virus attempts to modify the system files and settings, UAC will alert you by displaying an elevation prompt.

As for me, I prefer to turn off User Account Control because it nags me all the time to press the Continue button. Here’s how I did it.


You can do it from Control Panel -> User Accounts. Click on the user account that you want to turn off the UAC, and you’ll see a link that says “Turn User Account Control on or off“. Check the box to turn ON UAC and uncheck to turn OFF.

Another method is by using a freeware called TweakUAC. It has an extra feature which is you can switch User Account Control to the quiet mode. This will keep the User Account Control on but suppress the elevation prompts for the administrators.

I think that virus programmers can easily disable User Account Control by modifying the registry value EnableLUA and give it a value of 0. It’s that simple! So we might as well turn it off and be cautious of files that we’re unsure off and scan it with several antivirus engines for free.

[ Download TweakUAC ]