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.
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Thank you SO MUCH! You helped me a lot!
Thank you Raymond – very helpfull – added to toolbox.
When we talk about vista , people first impression is this windows is not stable yet. So every time whe nI request to change to vista , my IT staff will say NO NO NO.
Any way , is vista that kind of bad mah?
As far as I know, tweak UAC disables an option available in the local settings. I had done this some time back. All I did was switch on the auto elevation option and doing this causes windows to show me that UAC is off. :(
You can read about what I have said in my post UAC = false;
It shows you how to do the auto elevation manually and you can use that to enable/disable any other part of UAC. In my opinion, just enabling that one module is quite enough ;)
How does this tweekuac still work but quitely? In the windows security window it says it is not on, but in the User Accounts location it has the check box checked… What is actually going on with this exe file?
[...] My first impressions of Vista were quite good but I soon got bogged down with the much slated User Account Control (UAC) interrupting my every move with a “did you really want to go into that control panel item?” type message that you have to click through every time you go anywhere near something configurable. I can see why people are saying that although this is “good security” it is the weakest point as people will just turn it off! [...]
Raymond,
first of all, thank you for your kind words about our utility TweakUAC. :-)
I would like to address your concern that “virus programmers can easily disable User Account Control by modifying the registry value EnableLUA”. As a matter of fact, if UAC is enabled, it would not allow viruses to modify that registry value. The reason is, it requires a process to be elevated to be able to modify it, while UAC keeps viruses non-elevated, and therefore unable to change that particular registry value.
Note that I’m not saying it’s absolutely impossible to change that value, but virus writers will need to invent other ways of bypassing UAC, for example by finding security holes in the elevated programs and hijacking them.
So, it’s still a good idea to keep UAC enabled. The “quiet” mode offered by our utility TweakUAC is a very reasonable way to reduce the annoyance factor of UAC while still keeping your system protected by it.
Best,
Andrei Belogortseff
tweak-uac.com
For me ,I unchecked this option in control panel but still seeing this prompts. i don’t know why??
this a cool one
no more noisy vista