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| Cool utility to temporarily quiet Vista's UAC |
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By: Sean McHugh
Posted On: 6/6/2007
I have been using Vista (part time) for a while now, and as with every OS release for longer than I care to admit, I have spent a lot of time talking to a lot of people about it. I talk with my co workers about when we want to start rolling it out to our users, I talk with my fellow geeks about the various pros and cons of the new OS, I talk with friends and family about what the benefits are, if they want to get the new OS, and what it will take to get them there. In most of these conversations I have had about Vista, one recurring complaint keeps coming up. That complaint is centered around the new UAC feature and how much of a pain it is having to constantly answer the "Windows needs your permission.." prompts when you are making system changes. There is even one of those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercials that pokes fun at this very topic. If you haven't seen it yet, it's here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUPxkzV1RTc
I personally think that Microsoft is taking an unfair beating over the whole UAC prompt thing. For years the number one complaint about MS products, and the Windows OS in particular is that they aren't secure enough. Now that MS has made a concerted effort to make Vista more secure, everyone complains that not as easy to use because they are always getting security prompts. Keeping systems secure is not easy, especially when users insist on running as administrator level accounts, and installing, clicking, or running every thing that comes across their path.
A lot of people solve the issue by simply turning UAC off. I'm not a big fan of that approach, as it does leave your system more vulnerable. Many times websites, or e-mails, or picture files will attempt to automatically install stuff on your system. UAC popping up when something unexpectedly tries to install in one of these cases can be a lifesaver, especially for less savvy users. As someone who spends a fair bit of time tweaking my system, I also find the UAC popups annoying at times but don't want to just get rid of UAC, in case something slips by my radar. It would be great if when I start making tweaks to my system I could just turn UAC off for a while when I know I am performing a lot of tasks that require "permission" then turn it back on when I'm done tweaking. Unfortunately, turning UAC on or off requires a reboot and no one wants to have to reboot the whole system (twice if you want to turn UAC back on when you are done) just to avoid having to acknowledge a few prompts.
I recently found a utility that provides a pretty slick solution to this issue, it's called TweakUAC and can be found at http://www.tweak-uac.com/ It's a small executable program (no install required) that allows you to quickly toggle UAC on or off, but the cool thing is that it offers a UAC "quiet mode" that leaves UAC on and protecting your system, but supresses the elevation prompts that you see so much of when tweaking local system settings. It does not supress the messages you get when trying to run a program, or when installing something on the system or any of the other protections UAC provides. When you turn this quiet mode on the system will give you a security alert that UAC is off (it really isn't though) that is helpful to remind you that you ran TweakUAC to quiet the messages. If you forget that you left the system in quiet mode, the next time you reboot you will resume UAC mode as the utility will no longer be running. I would love it if there was a feature built into the program to have TweakUAC run only for a pre-determined amount of time, then revert back to UAC mode automatically. Of course you could aways wrap it in a script or something similar to add that functionlity.
This might be just the trick for some of the more "power" users that spend a lot of time messing with system settings and are most likely to be offended by Windows UAC always asking them for permission to do what they just told the system to do. It's a much better option than having those same users shut UAC off.
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