Temporarily disable UAC in Vista without rebooting

by Brad Linder Jun 3rd 2007

Tired of those "A program needs your permission to continue" warnings in Windows Vista? Well, you could turn the User Account Control off through Vista's control panel, but that eliminates some of Vista's oft-touted security enhancements.

Odds are the times you get most frustrated with the pop up warnings are when you're installing and testing new software on your computer, so it'd be nice to turn off UAC temporarily and turn it back on when you're done. But by default, that means rebooting your computer twice, once when you disable UAC, and again when you turn it back on.

TweakUAC is a nifty little freeware application that lets you quickly turn UAC on or off (which requires a reboot), or sets UAC to operate in quiet mode. What's quiet mode? It means that UAC is still running, but it won't display warnings if you're logged in as the administrator. Best of all, no reboot's required, so you can switch to quite mode while you're tweaking your software setup, and switch back to normal mode when you're done.

TweakUAC is an executable, meaning there's nothing to install. But if UAC is running normally on your PC, you will have to deal with a UAC prompt every time you run the program.

[via CyberNotes]

Tags: tweakuac, uac, user account control, UserAccountControl, vista, windows vista, WindowsVista

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Kevin said 5:43PM on 6-03-2007

Two other options: 1) Just log in as "Administrator" and no prompts will show up for that user. 2) You can accomplish the same thing here by launching secpol.msc and turning off UAC for administrators. Personally, I think option 1 is pretty simple, you just need to have the account enabled.

srenehan said 8:08PM on 6-03-2007

Disabling UAC without full knowledge of the applications your running while doing so... is not a good idea. It's like running every application under su on linux. It's not smart, and it's not needed.

And encouraging less technically minded people to do it is borderline incompetent on a disasterious scale. .. and for a "trusted" source of tech news like you it's discouraging to see a slight inconvenience is worth encouraging an entire user base to literally open the door to malware and dangerious apps they'd otherwise be protected from.

Sondra said 12:19AM on 6-04-2007

I was so tired of those little warnings (among other things) that I switched to linux...

srenehan said 12:19AM on 6-04-2007

hehe... so wait... you hate UAC so you move to an OS that requires you to enter a root password every time yhou want to change system settings. lovely.

RP said 8:12AM on 6-04-2007

I wish UAC had one simple thing: a checkbox:
"[x] Don't show again for this application".

I must run Regedit 20 times a day, and get prompted every single time. Arrrgghhh!!! Microsoft!!!

I know Vista is worried that a hacker may launch it, but you'd think Vista would know if an app was launched via the "Start" menu.

BTW, at least "sudo" on linux remembers your credentials for a while -- I don't get prompted repeatedly on each "sudo".

Mike said 12:19PM on 6-04-2007

Sondra, so you switched to linux, what did you do with all the Windows applications you had? Did you go with all proprietary stuff. I am a big believer in open source and run Open Office at home and work but it is a pain in the A@@ to support.

Here is a simple solution, if you don't like UAC, DON'T FREAKIN USE IT!

Using some creative VB scripting, WMI, and hashing, you can effectively exclude certain apps from UAC intervention. But that would require some RTFM, which is beyond a most of the complainers apparently.

RP said 12:37PM on 6-04-2007

Mike -- *please* explain how to exclude apps from UAC intervention (via creative VB scripting, WMI, and hashing). Thanks! I want to exclude Regedit.exe, for example. And regsvr32.exe, since it gets called every time I build my DLL in VS2005. I am in the Administrators group.

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