Norton Solves Windows Vista UAC Woes

Norton has created a great little utility that attempts to solve the Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) woes.

Albeit annoying, Windows Vista’s UAC feature is a great security tool that alerts the user before any potentially damaging system actions are taken. The problem is the user is frequently prompted with UAC dialog boxes on various actions that may otherwise seem trivial and sometimes even confronted with multiple prompts for a single action.

Although Microsoft has reportedly addressed the concern in the upcoming Windows 7, users have resorted to either silencing UAC altogether with a registry hack or TweakUAC or disabling it altogether in the mean time. Both not very secure alternatives.

Norton has seen the need for a solution and has provided a great, free utility that provides the same security benefits of Windows Vista’s UAC prompts but with the added functionality of remembering previous confirmations and providing more detail on the action to be taken. In addition to this, Norton’s UAC Tool will also optionally report confirmations from users and create a white-list to be distributed when the app gets out of beta to minimize unnecessary prompts.

Check out Norton Labs’ UAC Tool.

Windows Live Writer

I just downloaded the latest version of Windows Live Writer. It has a really awesome interface that will allow you to post to various weblogs, not just Microsoft's Spaces.

For anyone that has a weblog, be sure to check out the latest version of Windows Live Writer that apparently fixes a few bugs with Blogger.com. Great stuff, really.

You can download it here.

I'm never gonna give this up! :)

How to Get Windows Defender to Stop Blocking Startup Programs

Finally an answer! I'm so sick of the "Windows has blocked some startup programs" message and I have been searching for quite some time for how to get Windows Defender to stop blocking certain startup programs from running. I think it's a little ridiculous how difficult Microsoft makes this seemingly popular task. I have searched several times and have found several different proposed solutions, but none as elegant as the one I just found recently.



A simple program written by Jimmy Brush will analyze all of your startup applications and detail which ones are being blocked upon startup. From there, you can select to run the program as an administrator and say good bye to the incessant Windows Defender blocked startup prompts.

Download JB's Startup Program Unblocker

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.