Disabling UAC on Windows Vista
I strongly recommend that if you have access to an Administrator level User Account that you leave UAC enabled. Malware is becoming increasingly more common, insidious and malicious. Simply using a few malware scanners and ‘being careful’ is no longer enough to safeguard your system. As security measures become more complex, so too is malware. It is not an exaggeration to say that all it takes is one incidence of a malware infection and your login passwords and credit card details could be compromised and sent across the Internet within hours. Hackers don’t have to specifically target you or your machine, there are automated scripts and software which do the work for malware creators and hence can compromise thousands of machines with little effort if they sit unprotected.
UAC is an inconvenience when compared to not having any prompting behavior, and it can indeed seem excessive at times. However UAC has no performance impact so disabling it will not make your system any faster. Like most people I started off absolutely hating UAC and its continual prompting, but after a while of using it I’ve found that I’ve become used to it and the extra layer of security is actually welcome now; it only requires one or two extra mouse clicks to accept a UAC prompt which is hardly a major sacrifice. By itself UAC is not the perfect form of protection, as sometimes it does seem to go overboard with its prompts (though SP1 has reduced the number of prompts in certain cases), but it does give you greater control and knowledge of exactly what is running on your system and what changes are being made to the system at any time. Ironically this is precisely what a more advanced user should desire – more control over the programs running on their system, not less.
If you still wish to turn off UAC, the process is relatively straightforward. Go to Control Panel>User Accounts and click the ‘Turn User Account Control on or off’ link. On the next screen, untick the ‘Use User Account Control (UAC) to help protect your computer’ and click OK. You will then have to reboot for the change to come into effect. Remember that whenever you enable or disable UAC, due to Virtualization (see further above), you may lose your settings for particular programs if they were not installed with full Administrator privileges, or were installed under a different User Account.
Some final thoughts on UAC:
- UAC has no performance impact, compared to the performance impact that background malware scanners have in slowing down reads and writes to your hard drive.
- UAC tries to provide a compromise between the convenience of running an Administrator account all the time with the security of running a Standard Account.
- UAC is perfect for people wanting to have multiple accounts on the same PC. By setting these accounts as Standard Users, they each cannot install harmful software or change system settings, but due to Virtualization can still install and use most non-intrusive software normally and without impact on the other users.
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Tags: disable, UAC, vista, windows
