The 7th X or UAC unrooted

The 7th X or UAC unrooted

A guide to claim back your machine. UAC-free.

Now for me one of the most serious annoyances preventing even basic usage of Windows 7 (or Vista for that matter) as compared to XP was its built-in and seemingly undefiable UAC – User Account Control. I know, many people talk about it really making things more secure and that they don’t feel it a problem to log out to install a new driver or app or Run As Administrator to run certain programs. And that UAC dialog popping up all the time doesn’t bother them at all even if you have to press Yes three times when importing a registry dump.

That’s not how things used to work in XP. Sure, since SP2 you got that annoying Open File – Security Warning dialog box for downloaded files but it’s nowhere near the UAC mayhem. And it could be disabled with a simple tweak.

As it turns out there is a simple trick to unroot UAC completely if you don’t mind exposing yourself and all. As you probably know you can disable most of UAC by going to User Account Control Settings (type «UAC» into Start or Control Panel search box) as explained here. However, even the lowest value doesn’t let got of its notifications completely. For this reason we won’t be using this setting.

In Windows 7 there is a built-in Administrator account. It’s disabled by default and when installing fresh Windows you are prompted for user name with which a new standard user account is created. Thus default Administrator remains under the hood for most users (which might not be a bad idea but not for everybody).

And the interesting thing is that Administrator not just always runs in elevated mode but it gets no UAC prompt (on my system these two things somehow didn’t go in hand) regardless of other settings. So if you enable it and use as your primary account you will effectively activate the same system as on Windows XP.
The recipe

Now let’s get some figures. First, go to Control Panel → Small icons (switch to list view) → Administration → Computer Management. In this window locate System Tools → Local Users and Groups → Users. Click and you will see the list of users the system has.

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As you can see Administrator is disabled by default (there is a tiny icon overlay). Double-click on it and unchek Account is disabled. Click OK.

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Next, you might want to rename it to something of your choice – simply right-click, choose Rename and enter whatever name you wish. Hit Enter. This won’t rename the account’s folder in Users (former Documents and Settings) but there are solutions for this – just search.

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Now while you are working under Administrator you won’t see a single trace of UAC. Insecure? Probably, but I prefer external security like NAT or firewalled router. Works better, less noise.

There are other ways to trick UAC that you can google up involving heavy modifications of group policies (now talk about security) but for me the above simple method works like a charm.
Autologon

There is just one thing left. In Windows XP if you have just one account and it’s not password-protected the system will automatically log on on boot. Actually, with TweakUI you could have a custom user log on and even provide a password for that.

In Windows 7 you can go with the standard Control Panel applet as explained at SuperUser. As in XP, you can log on an arbitrary user and provide a password if necessary.

With these two simple hacks you can reclaim your PC and are free to do whateer you do – even run malware if you must

Nice

Nice Tut