Chris Pirillo » UAC

How to Disable the UAC in Windows Vista

Chris Pirillo — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:29:19 +0000

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Recently I threw down the gauntlet, asking all of you to submit your best screencasts. I plan to highlight the best of the best here in my channel, and help promote yours. Dylan has sent a few in to us now, and they’re fantastic. This particular screencast is going to help you quickly and easily turn off the UAC in Vista.

The first way that Dylan shows us to disable the UAC is to go into your control panel, and select “User Accounts and Family Safety”. Then go to “Add or Remove User Accounts”. Highlight your account so that it’s selected. You’ll see an option at the bottom that says “Go to the Main User Accounts Page”. Select that, and at the bottom of that screen, you’ll see where it says “Turn the User Account Control On or Off”. Choose that, and uncheck the box. You’ll then need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

For more advanced users who are comfortable when using msconfig, you can use this method, instead. Go to your Start menu, and type msconfig in the search box so that it will open that up. Once in msconfig, click on the “Tools” tab. Scroll down until you see where it says “Disable UAC”. Click the “Launch” button, and another small box will pop up telling you the operation was completed successfully. Close that little box, click OK in msconfig, and close everything. Reboot your computer, and you’re finished!

See how easy that was? Thanks much to Dylan for providing us with this screencast. Keep them coming, everyone! Who knows – you could be featured next.

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How to Disable the UAC in Windows Vista

What’s New in Windows 7: User Account Control (UAC)

Chris Pirillo — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:19:08 +0000

What’s New in Windows 7: User Account Control (UAC)

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Oh Vista UAC how we hate you. The UAC is still present in Windows 7. Instead of just being an all-or-nothing as the UAC is inside of Vista, it has selectable controls in Windows 7! Windows 7 UAC Settings has a Slider to change your ‘comfort-level’ with the notifications.

To customize your UAC in Windows 7, go to the Control Panel, and choose User Accounts, and then Account Settings. You can choose to “never notify” or “always notify”… and there are two other levels in between. My recommendation is to leave it at the default setting for a bit, to see how that works for you, and then adjusting as needed from there. The default setting is to only notify you when something attempts to make changes to Windows. That’s probably a good thing for most people to know about, right?

If you’re a novice, or setting it up for a novice, my suggestion is to bump it up to always notify. That would notify them any time programs try to install software or make changes to the system. If they aren’t sure of what they’re doing, they could potentially create harm on their computer.

Since most programs didn’t support the UAC when it was unleashed in Vista, the programs would fail and create unnecessary problems, which created bad user feedback and experience. Since most software is built with the support of the UAC now, it’s pretty much a great experience within Windows 7.

It’s very nice to see that the UAC has been casually refined. It’s apparent that Microsoft listened to the feedback from the users who hated it when it came out in Vista. So far, the only time I’ve been prompted by it in Windows 7 is when installing drivers. That’s a good thing, since those would definitely make changes to my system.

This is better than all-or-nothing as it was in Vista. Keep your settings at the default level when you start out, and make your changes as needed. Definitely try Windows 7 if you have a machine to do so with. Start playing with it! You won’t be disappointed.

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What’s New in Windows 7: User Account Control (UAC)

Automatic Login for Windows Vista

Chris Pirillo — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 16:49:22 +0000

Automatic Login for Windows Vista

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http://live.pirillo.com/ – I decided to give Vista another go, and reinstalled it on my computer, along with SP1. Being a fresh install, I had to go through and set everything up the way I had it before, including the way Vista logs me in.

I want Vista to automatically log me in each time I start the computer up. I wasn’t sure how to do this, so I went to Google. One of the first hits I came across actually linked back to our Lockergnome.com blogging network. Thankfully, this isn’t so hard to do.

To open this in the UAC (or User Account Control) in Vista, go to the start/search area of Vista, and type in NETPLWIZ. Once you get there:

UNcheck the box next to “Users should enter a username and password to use this computer”, and then press OK.
Type the username and password for the user you want to automatically logon to Windows Vista when it boots up and press OK
Reboot the computer

It’s that simple. Vista will remember the username and password, and you won’t have to log in every time you boot the computer.

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Automatic Login for Windows Vista