Windows 8 : Sharing and Securing with User Accounts - Using User Accounts (part 2) - Turning UAC on and off

Turning UAC on and off

If at all possible, you should follow standard best practices and keep UAC active on your own computer. But if it proves to be impractical, you can turn off UAC.

Even though it is much improved from Windows Vista and Windows 7, User Account Control (UAC) is not always a very popular Windows 8 feature. After all, nobody wants a feature that makes them do more work, even when the extra work is nothing more than an occasional extra mouse click. Furthermore, sometimes UAC is just impractical. For example, if you give your kids standard user accounts, they can’t install their own programs. But if you give them administrative accounts, you can’t institute parental controls.

Changing UAC settings is a simple process. From the Windows 8 interface, display the Charms Bar and click Search. Click Control Panel, click User Accounts And Family Safety, and then click User Accounts. Or from the desktop, press Windows+W and click Control Panel. Click User Accounts And Family Safety and then click User Accounts. Click Change User Account Control Settings and then, if prompted to do so, enter an administrative password to get to the dialog box shown in Figure 2.

FIGURE 2 Change User Account Control settings.

You can choose from the following options:

• Always Notify: Windows will notify you if programs try to install software or make changes to the computer, or if you make changes to Windows settings.
• Notify Me Only When Apps Try To Make Changes To My Computer (Default): Windows will not notify you when you make changes to your computer, but will notify you, by dimming the desktop and displaying a warning, if programs attempt to make changes.
• Notify Me Only When Apps Try To Make Changes To My Computer (Do Not Dim My Desktop): Windows will not notify you when you make changes to your computer, but will notify you when programs attempt to make changes. However, Windows will not dim the desktop, but instead just display a message.
• Never Notify: Windows will not notify you of changes (turns off UAC). The only safe time to use this option is when you need to install a program that doesn’t work with UAC. Turn off UAC, install the program, and then turn on UAC again.

To turn User Account Control off, drag the slider down to Never Notify. Or, if it was already off and you want better security, drag the slider up to the desired level. Then click OK.

If you turned off UAC, when you click a shielded option, you will receive no prompting for credentials or status checking. Things will basically be as they were in Windows XP and other earlier versions of Windows.

You can still institute parental controls, provided that you have one password-protected administrative account and each child has a standard account. (This also assumes that the kids don’t know the password to the administrative account.) When a child tries to change or deactivate parental controls, a message box will appear, informing him or her of insufficient privileges. To change parental controls, you need to log in to the password-protected administrative account.