Saturday, December 22, 2007

Auto-Elevate UAC Prompts with TweakUAC

Another day, another useful app.

TweakUAC is a small little utility that will enable an option in Windows Vista to auto-elevate UAC command prompts. As is suggested by several Microsoft bloggers and other users 'in the know', you really shouldn't run Windows Vista without UAC turned on, but the frequency of the prompts can be quite frustrating and annoying.

It is important to note, however, that the UAC isn't a 'dumb always-prompt' feature. It actually does "learn" from your answers. So, for example, if you frequently run a certain application or do a specific task and allow the elevation a number of times, then eventually UAC will stop prompting you about that specific task. But yes, that is all in theory; the actual procedure does vary quite a bit and it may sometimes seem like it never "learns" anything. The price we pay for security, eh?

Well anyway, back to the app for this post. TweakUAC will basically auto-enable the following feature (directions as posted by Microsoft blogger, Tim Sneath):
  1. From the Start search bar, type "Local Security Policy"
  2. Accept the elevation prompt
  3. From the snap-in, select Security Settings -> Local Policy -> Security Options
  4. Scroll down to the bottom, where you'll find nine different group policy settings for granular configuration of UAC.


So, although you can do this yourself manually, TweakUAC will do this for you automatically. It is essentially a GUI for the aforementioned process.

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