Vista Question: Can I Disable The User Account Control (UAC) For Administrators Only? ~ Ask The Admin

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Vista Question: Can I Disable The User Account Control (UAC) For Administrators Only?

We posted a little while ago how to disable the UAC in Vista to stop annoying me! Now here are instructions on doing ONLY for the Administrator account. Their is a reg file link towards the bottom that will do the trick for you! Thanks HowToGeek.Com.

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.

To configure this setting on Windows 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

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.

Change the setting to "Elevate without prompting". You should be all done.

For Windows Vista Home users, the Local Security Policy doesn't come with the distribution, so you'll have to use the following registry file.

Just unzip this registry file, double-click on it, and it will add into the registry. That's all there is to it.