Microsoft Windows Vista’s User Access Control is really generally a good thing, but it tends to be poorly executed. Most power users want to remove UAC because it is so annoying. Instead of disabling UAC, a better solution would be to use an account with administrator-level access as your usual user login account, and then disable UAC only for accounts that have administrator-level access. That way, your user account won’t be subject to UAC prompts, but other user accounts will be. This is dangerous because it gets rid of the protections keeping bad things from running as elevated users.

On any version of Vista, except Home Basic and Home Premium, you can disable UAC for administrator accounts by following these steps:

1. Click the Start button and launch the Local Security Policy editor
   by entering secpol.msc in the Search box.

2. Select the Local Policies item in the left panel to expand the tree,
   then expand Security Options under Local Policies.

3. Scroll down the list in the right panel to locate User Account
   Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin
   Approval Mode. Right-click that item and choose Properties.

4. Select Elevate without prompting and close the dialog.

If you use Vista Home Basic or Home Premium, the Local Security Policy editor, unfortunately, isn’t included. To disable UAC for administrator accounts, you’ll need to edit the Registry. Follow these steps to do that –
and be extremely careful, since mistakes could render your system unusable!

1. Click Start and enter regedit in the Search box to launch the Registry Editor.
2. Navigate to the following key:

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

3. Double-click the ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin item.
4. Change the value to 00000000.
5. Close the dialog and exit the Registry Editor.