The UAC (User Account Control) feature of Vista has been called into question ever since the Longhorn preview builds and RC (release candidate) versions of Vista.  UAC presents you with annoying dialogs even under admin accounts asking you to confirm your actions.  They are annoying.  However, there are other features of UAC that get disabled when you turn it off.  It seems that Microsoft has a hidden feature of UAC called “quiet mode” that gives you the benefit of the other features while disabling the confirmation dialogs.

Microsoft would like you to believe all those confirmation dialogs are protecting you from malware, spyware and viruses but it’s not, not really.  The only thing the UAC dialogs serve to do is protect you from yourself.  It’s just to make sure that you want to actually perform that task.  For example, are you absolutely sure you want to change those msconfig settings, are you sure you want to launch msconfig?  Power users like to configure and reconfigure system settings on a regular basis and these dialogs are annoying to us, and I’m sure to regular users as well.

The way UAC is designed is flawed it is an “in-your-face” annoying thing when the default mode is used.  Mac users have security features similar to UAC without the annoying dialogs.  Vista has this feature so let’s turn it on.

There isn’t one good reason why this feature wasn’t built-in to Vista, it’s possible that Microsoft didn’t want to confuse users or wants us to use UAC the way it thinks we should use it.

Before proceeding if UAC is off, turn it on.  Go to the Security Center in the Control Panel and look under “Other Security Settings” for “User Account Control,”  if it is off, a button will say “Turn on Now” so click it.  Don’t worry about restarting, yet.

Download a free utility called TweakUAC, it’s a lightweight program that has but one purpose and you don’t even have to install it.  After downloading it, launch the program, agree to the license terms and select the “Leave UAC operating in the quiet mode” option and restart your system.  This does three things.  It leaves the primary protection features of UAC in place, programs will not be allowed to operate with admin privileges, the memory vitalization protection is left enabled (an excellent defense against malware and viruses) and yes, the UAC notifications are turned off.

Under an Admin account, programs will launch with standard privileges and must be explicitly told by the user to launch with admin permissions (a right click option) and UAC dialogs will be suppressed.  Standard accounts, however, will see no change in behavior, UAC dialogs will be presented and admin user name and password must be provided for most actions.

TweakUAC was designed to give those using admin accounts a break while still leaving it’s primary purposes enabled.  When using TweakUAC with the quiet mode, Vista may tell you that UAC is turned off.  To check that the other UAC protections are still working, go to the Processes view in Task Manager, select View and then Select Columns, check the Virtualization option and click OK.  You will now be able to view which processes have Virtualization enabled, if some of them do then your UAC protection features are still running (just without the annoying dialogs).

Here’s a note for all you good people at Microsoft, this should have been built-in, this is how security is supposed to work.  Get to work on making this a part of Vista SP2 and Windows 7, thanks.

Thanks to Matt (you know who you are) for this post idea.

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Entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 10:35 am under Microsoft, Tips and advice, Vista.

Read more entries by Jonathan Schlaffer.
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