Microsoft Weekly

How to manage User Account Control

by Ed Bott

Windows' User Account Control (UAC) feature requires you to provide an administrator's permission when you perform certain tasks that affect your system's configuration. When this feature debuted a decade ago in Windows Vista, it was, to put it charitably, exceedingly unpopular.

Since then, Microsoft has tweaked the behavior of UAC so it's less annoying while still providing a prompt that prevents standard users from making potentially harmful changes to the system configuration.

You'll find these settings in Control Panel. Under the System and Maintenance heading, click Change User Account Control settings. That exposes a slider with four options that vary slightly depending on whether you are working with a Standard account or an Administrator account.

When you're signed in as an administrator, moving the slider to the bottom option eliminates all UAC prompts. The only time this option makes sense is if you have a dedicated administrator account that you use only for managing the system and never for interactive computing. (Even then, you should probably avoid this setting.)

Moving the slider down one notch from its default settings might make sense if you have a weak graphics subsystem that takes too long to dim the screen before displaying a UAC consent dialog box.

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