UAC made tolerably
Not surprisingly a lot of the frequently voiced criticisms (a least among home users) of Vista has been directed towards UAC. So far I haven’t really seen any benefit of UAC, instead it’s been a minor nuisance. Minor because the number of times I encountered the prompts were reasonably limited, I’d say about twice a week.
That has changed…
My latest purchases in the games department, Advanced Tactics and Carriers at War from MatrixGames had the annoying habit of giving me a UAC prompt telling me that “An unidentified program wants access to your computer” each time I started them up. Well, the programs are not unidentifed, I know what they are, I asked for them.
Best solution would obviously be if the programs didn’t trigger the UAC prompt, i.e. didn’t want to run with administrator rights.
Second best solution would be if I could somehow tell UAC that is is actually ok to run the programs, please don’t bother me again.
Worst solution would be to disable UAC. Tempting as it is, some other security features in Vista require UAC to be activated.
Second worst solution would be to bite the bullet and just accept the UAC prompt each time I wanted to run the programs.
However, I have found a fifth solution:
Fire up regedit, navigate to
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
and change
“ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin” to “0″ (default is 2).
If this sounds like gibberish to you, you shouldn’t be playing with regedit anyway 
What this does is to elevate programs that require administrator rights silently for administrative users. If you change the value to 1 you still get the UAC prompt and also has to provide full credentials, i.e. type in your password.
Obviously I take no responsibility what-so-ever for any ill-effects this might have…
Now, getting rid of the prompts also means getting rid of a large part of the security that UAC provides. Think twice. For me, it’s almost made UAC my best friend.