Microsoft Vista: How to Disable UAC Warnings

Since I have been using Microsoft Vista I have kept UAC disabled since I was repeatedly bombarded by warnings. These messages were constantly displayed on the screen whenever I wanted to change some system settings, and became annoying very quickly. The quick solution, therefore, was for me to disable UAC.

Everything had been working fine until recently. In the last few months I began to experience a few issues with some of the installed applications. After doing some research, I decided to enable UAC and since then the problems have disappeared. I also decided to find a way to disable the UAC warnings, and after some quick research found out that you can. So now I have UAC enabled and no annoying warnings. This post explains how to disable the UAC messages in Microsoft Vista.

Application Issues

I thought I had solved my problems when I disable Vista’s new UAC feature. I was no longer getting those annoying warnings on the screen each time I configured the system, and everything appeared to be working fine. Up until the last few months at least.

Over the last few months I began to experience a problem with several applications. Each time I launched specific applications the Windows Installer window would appear and indicate that it was configuring the application. This caused a delay, at times, of a few minutes before the application actually launched.

After viewing the EventViewer, I noticed the problems usually occurred when the current user, which was an administrator account, didn’t have permissions to even read specific registry keys. After modifying the permissions, the application would stop configuring itself. Unfortunately, the problem would reappear again.

After researching the issue online, I came across an article where someone experienced the same issue. He explained that he decided to enable UAC, and after doing so, his problems disappeared. I wouldn’t mind enabling UAC, but I don’t want those annoying messages to appear on the screen.

After doing some more research, I found out that you can easily enable UAC and also disable the warnings it displays. The next few sections explain to do this with the various versions of Microsoft Vista.

Microsoft Vista Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise

To disable the warning messages, use the following steps:

1. Click “Start->Run”.
2. In the dialog type “gpedit.msc” and press “Enter”.
3. In the “Local Policies” list, click “Security Options”.
4. Scroll down and double-click “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode”. The entire title may not appear in the window, so look for something that matches the beginning of the above option.
5. In the dialog, change the setting from “Prompt for Consent” to “Elevate without prompting”.
6. Click “OK” to accept your changes. Those annoying warning messages should now be disabled, but UAC will still be active.

Microsoft Vista Home and Premium

Other versions of Vista don’t include the Local Security Policy tool, but there is another option you can use. To disable the UAC warning messages, use the following steps:

1. Click “Start->Run”.
2. In the dialog type “regedit”, and press “Enter”.
3. Navigate to the following key:

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
    SOFTWARE
     Microsoft
      Windows
       CurrentVersion
        Policies
         System

4. On the right side, double-click the value “ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin”.
5. Change the value from “2” to “0” to disable the UAC warnings.

After performing the above steps, I was no longer presented with the Vista UAC warning messages. Also, the problems I had been experiencing with the applications were no longer an issue since I have enabled UAC.