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I love the concept of UAC. I’m sure it’ll make the OS more secure for people like my mom. For power users, you’ll soon want to just shut the damned thing off. I know it has good intentions but it just gets in the way sometimes. I was always under the impression that UAC was either on or off, and that if you turned it off you lost some of the security built into IE7. Turns out the folks over at TweakVista have written up an article on how to disable UAC, but only for the administrator accounts. That’s pretty slick, now it won’t get in my way, but it will prompt my wife/kid/mother/etc and help keep them safe.

Follow these steps to disable UAC only for administrators:

1. Click on the Start button and type in secpol.msc and hit Enter.
2. Expand Local Policies and then Security Options.
3. Scroll to the bottom and locate “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode”.
4. Right click on this setting and select Properties.
5. Set the value to Elevate without prompting.
6. Reboot.

As soon as you do this, the security center will start barking at you that UAC is disabled. I guess they intend to annoy you one way or another. You can of course disable the security center alerts as well. Click on the alert in the system tray, then click Change the way Security Center alerts me and select ”I do not want notification messages from Security Center”.

Every since User Account Control (UAC) hit the streets people have been complaining about how it darkens the screen out when asking for permission to do something. Personally I didn’t find it that annoying, but a lot of people have been complaining about it. You can change this default behavoir. Go to the start menu and type in security in the 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 the item, and change it to disabled and then click OK.

Note: This does make your system slightly less secure, so be warned.

For Windows Home users, you will need to open up regedit via the start menu search box. Browse down to this registry key:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]

You should see a key called PromptOnSecureDesktop. Double-click this and change the value to 0.

Source: HowToGeek. Check out some other great posts from the same site!