4 Ways to Make UAC Less Annoying on Windows 7 / Vista The single biggest irritation in Windows 7 and Vista is the UAC (User Account Control) system, especially for people that do a lot of tweaking. When you are trying to make configuration changes, it seems like every couple of seconds you are hitting another UAC prompt. Sure, it’s more secure… but what options do we have to make it less annoying?
There are at least 4 different ways that we can tweak UAC to be less annoying, Note: Disabling or modifying UAC is a security risk. If you want to be as secure as possible, you should likely leave things alone. 1) Disable UAC Entirely The first thing that you can always do is completely disable UAC… the only problem with this is that you’ll end up making the system less secure if you are also the type of person that downloads and tests a lot of software. I can’t recommend that you do this, but at least you know that you have the option to. This is an easier method that you can use to do the same thing from the GUI interface in either Windows 7 or Vista. UAC is ANNOYING. Note: Disabling UAC will lead to a less secure system, so be warned. Disable UAC on Windows Vista Open up Control Panel, and type in “UAC” into the search box. You’ll see a link for “Turn User Account Control (UAC) on or off”: uac1.png On the next screen you should uncheck the box for “Use User Account Control (UAC)”, and then click on the OK button. uac2.png You’ll need to reboot your computer before the changes take effect, but you should be all done with annoying prompts. Disable UAC on Windows 7 Windows 7 makes it much easier to deal with UAC settings, and in fact you don’t have to completely disable UAC if you don’t want to. Just type UAC into the start menu or Control Panel search box. You can simply drag the slider up or down, depending on how often you want to be alerted. Windows 7 UAC Settings If you drag it all the way down to the bottom, you’ll have disabled it entirely. 2) Auto-Accept UAC Prompts for Administrators Only If you want to leave UAC enabled, but disable the prompts from showing up under your administrator account, you can tweak a setting that will “Elevate without prompting”, so you never see the prompt show up. This is more secure than disabling UAC entirely, because an application started as a regular user can’t perform an action that is meant for administrators. For instance, Internet Explorer can still run in protected mode this way. If you can’t stand the User Account Control prompts, but you’d still like to retain a little bit of security, you can disable it for Administrator accounts only. What we’ll be doing is actually changing Windows Vista to automatically elevate the privilege level for administrators without prompting. Note: Disabling UAC will lead to a less secure system, so be warned. The nice thing about doing it this way is that regular users as well as Internet Explorer still run as regular users, and would still use the normal security mechanisms. Disable on Windows 7 or Vista Business or Ultimate To configure this setting on Windows 7 / Vista Business and Ultimate, you can use the Local Security Policy configuration. Just type in secpol.msc into the Start menu search box and hit enter. Now browse down to Local Policies \ Security Options local-security-policy-uac-admins.png Find the following in the list: “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode” and double-click on it. elevate-without-prompting.png Change the setting to “Elevate without prompting”. You should be all done. 3) Disable the Blackout Screen (Secure Desktop) The most annoying part of UAC for me is the screen that blacks out everything other than the UAC prompt… because it usually takes forever to show up, and depending on your video card it can do weird things with your desktop. You can disable the secure desktop feature but leave the UAC prompts the way they are… of course this is potentially a security hole as well, since an application could fraudulently “click” the prompt for you. (Secure desktop prevents applications from doing this) To get to the configuration screen for this, type in security to the start menu search box. You should see the Local Security Policy as the top search item. In the Local Security Policy window, browse down to Local Policies \ Security Options Over in the right hand part of the window, scroll down near the bottom and find the item titled “User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation”. Double-click on it to open it up, then change it to disabled: At this point Secure Desktop should be disabled. Windows Vista Home Users For Windows Home users, you will need to open up regedit via the start menu search box. Browse down to this registry key: block quote [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] block quote end Right-click in the right-hand pane and create a new 32-bit DWORD value called PromptOnSecureDesktop, setting the value to 0. 4) Create Administrator Mode Shortcuts Without UAC Prompts Instead of disabling UAC in any way, what we can do is setup a few shortcuts that bypass UAC entirely. This is especially useful if you open a particular administrator-mode application a dozen times per day. The trick to this is using task scheduler to launch the applications, and then telling task scheduler to run the task. This is more secure than the other options, since only our special shortcut will bypass UAC. One of the most talked about annoyances in Windows Vista are the UAC prompts that constantly pop up when you are trying to make system changes. It’s especially irritating when you often need to run a particular tool that requires administrator mode in order to run. Thankfully there’s a simple hack that you can do to create an administrator mode shortcut that doesn’t prompt for UAC. Note: This should also work on Windows 7. This works by setting up a scheduled task to run the application in Administrator mode, and then setting up a separate shortcut that tells the scheduled task to run. If that sounds difficult, it’s really not… just follow through the instructions below. Note: Because you are required to click through a UAC prompt to setup the scheduled task, it’s not really a security loophole. Create the Scheduled Task Item Open up Task Scheduler through the start menu search box (usually you can just type task), and then on the right-hand side click the “Create Task” link: image The first thing you need to do is give the task a short, simple name, preferably without any spaces in it. Then check the box for “Run with highest privileges” (very important) Now switch to the Actions tab, click the New button, and then browse down to the application that you are trying to start. Close out of the dialogs by clicking the OK button, which should create the new task in the list. You can right-click on it and choose “Run” at this point, simply to make sure that it launches the application the way you were expecting. At this point our scheduled tasks setup is done, so you can close out of that if you want… as long as you remember the name that you used for the task. Create the Shortcut to Start the Task Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu. image Now here’s where the real magic happens… we need to add a command that will run the scheduled task, passing in the name of the task that we used. As you can see, I used runregedit as the name for the task. Make sure you enter the task name like this, replacing the capitalized letters for the name of your task. (It’s not case sensitive) block quote schtasks /run /tn “TASKNAMEINQUOTES” block quote end Now give your shortcut some useful name, and then click next to create it. At this point you should have a shortcut that will launch the application in administrator mode. But we can tweak it a bit more… open up the properties for the shortcut, and then change the Run drop-down to “Minimized” (to hide the schtasks command line utility), and then click on Change Icon. The simplest thing to do is just browse down to the application that you are opening with the shortcut… and you should see the icons for the application itself. So now you have a nice looking icon that launches an application in Administrator mode… with no prompts whatsoever. Extra: Make sure to Install (at least) Vista Service Pack 1 If you haven’t already installed Service Pack 1 or later, you should make sure that you install it… one of the fixes included will limit the number of UAC prompts you have to click through to modify system files. I’m curious what percentage of our readers have actually disabled UAC. I personally am using method #4, since it’s the best in terms of security, but also eliminating the annoyance for the couple of applications I launch a dozen times per day. Thanks Srikanth To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
