Disabling Vista UAC Temporarily

Sat, 17 Mar 2007 05:19:25 GMT

The UAC (User Account Control) is a feature in vista that elevates the privileges of a user whenever required. So this way you don't have to login as administrator to install anything or make any changes to the system. It's really debatable how much useful this feature is, but I really like this feature.

But sometimes this feature pops up too many dialogs when you are setting the system for the first time. There is no way to temporarily turn off this feature as it requires a reboot.

One way to overcome this problem is to run the command prompt as administrator, and run all your processes from inside it. Now all there processes initiated from inside it will automatically have administrative privileges and wont pop up UAC dialog.

But there is another easier way to do this.

Go to your windows folder, right click on explorer.exe and select pin to start menu. This way we can access it easily.
Now open any folder, press the Alt key and a menu will pop up. From that menu select folder options and go to the view tab. Now from the list of options enable "Launch folder window in a separate process". This will essentially make windows create a new process whenever you open a new window. So while launching explorer we can change its privilege to have administrative access, and any process launched from inside it will have administrative access.

So just open the start menu. Right click on the explorer.exe shortcut that you just created in step-1 and select "run as administrator" from the right click menu. It will open up your documents folder. You can always modify the location that you want it to open by default. By my documents is good enough for me J.

So no more UAC prompts for anything toy open inside this explorer window. Isn't it cool? I think it's a nice thing to do when you have to install lots of stuff

Blog on Rails: Vista UAC

Disabling Vista UAC Temporarily