If you don’t like to be bothered by Windows UAC (User Account Control) or you need to run some applications that require you to turn it off, then you probably have disabled UAC in you Windows 7 installations.
Just today, I disabled it on my fresh Windows 8 installation only to see some apps like Media Player Classic Home Cinema needed administrator privileges to change its file associations. I double checked my settings and it was off, so I wondered why it didn’t run with admin privileges.
After checking the Windows registry, I saw that the value of the key EnableLUA was still set to 1. This value controls the overall state of UAC. I always set this to 0 on my pesonal unattended installations by setting it to false. You read more on this here.
Editing the registry
To disable UAC completely, you just need to change the value of the EnableLUA key from 1 to 0. Righ click on the lower left corner on the desktop (remember that we don’t have the traditional Start Menu anymore) and click on Run. Type regedit to open the Windows Registry Editor.
- Navigate to the following key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
- Double click the EnableLUA key and change its value from 1 to 0.
- You will be propmted to restart for the changes to take effect.
Reboot and you will have UAC completely disabled.
Using a REG file
If you don’t want to edit the registry yourself, you can copy the following text, paste it into a text editor like notepad and save it as a .reg file. Double click the .reg file you just saved and click OK on the screen prompt you will see.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] "EnableLUA"=dword:00000000
