Win 7 64 Is UAC tied to any other applications? i.e disabling UAC reduces the protection of any other applications.
Should I disable it on my family system? Coz they just sometimes click YES & Sometimes NO without checking the alert. And they are average users. Dont know anything about security & neither want to learn.
It affects IEs protected mode, and some types of windows virtualisation. The alerts only say "xy needs administrative rights", so often hard to understand for average users. But the other way: Most applications shouldn't need those rights nowadays. At least I would turn it to high and leave it on.
What I do when people are click happy a) Set UAC to silently elevate (you still keep the goodies of UAC) b) Set UAC to deny elevation of unsigned executables Regards Kees
But then they will not be able to install apps as many are unsigned. And there are 3 users on this system. And they do uninstall/install quite a few apps. I think keeping UAC enabled on default would be better.
Sure, as long as they install safe applications. My daughter's laptop recently had a malware fiesta going on it because of some EA games-recommended downloads she installed on it. At least that's what she figured it was.
The best bet would be to prevent them from being able to install programs but this is not feasible in most cases. Some "average users" can still keep their systems free from malware (for the most part) without any hand-holding, so there is still hope. Some of them still install junk and ad-ware programs but that is usually because they do not know any better. You might want to just point it out and teach them a thing or 2. As for UAC, please keep it ON. Disabling it would not make things any better than it is. It just makes things worse.
As stated here, if you have a program that has been running under UAC virtualization and you turn of UAC, you will lose data and settings that apply to that program. Plus you may no longer be able to run said program without setting directory or file level permissions for that program. I just leave it on, it doesn't stop you from being able to do anything you should be doing.
I have kept UAC ON with default settings. Eset AV Unchecky Ublock for Google Chrome Adblock Plus for IE Win Fw default settings
How do you set UAC to : a) Set UAC to silently elevate (you still keep the goodies of UAC) b) Set UAC to deny elevation of unsigned executables as per Kees?
Run REGEDIT and navigate to the key HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System "ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin" User Account Control: Behavior of the Elevation Prompt For Administrators in Admin Approval Mode 0 = run in quite mode (keep UAC on, but silently elevate to Admin) 1 = run UAC, when an elevation request occurs, your are asked to enter the admin password on sacure desktop(my current setting) "ValidateAdminCodeSignatures" User Account Control: Only elevate executables that are signed and validated 1 = ON 0=OFF (default) See picture
