Disabling Vista’s “Windows needs your permission” alert boxes

March 14, 2008

A while back I complained about Vista petering me constantly about whether or not I wanted my computer to do something I just asked it to do. It made installing software or debugging performance issues extremely annoying. Well, thankfully the people at Lifehacker found a way to do that.

It’s sped up a lot of tasks. Not just because it saves me another click but because the User Account Control (or “UAC,” the “feature” responsible for the pester) slows down my installations something fierce. Apparently the UAC has to scan every installation to see whether or not it needs to activate itself to annoy the crap out of you. Since it does this without providing any feedback at all it just seems like either the installer is extra slow or the computer is hanging.

One thing it couldn’t speed up, sadly, was re-installing Vista. Which I did last night because no matter what strategy I tried Vista still couldn’t find the drivers for USB devices it was working with fine two weeks ago. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go re-install my feed reader.

Posted in Grumbles, Technology