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When I was running Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit, I had UAC disabled and everything was working smoothly for me. Now I've updated to Windows 10 Pro 32-bit (and recently also the 2015-11 update), I'm having a few issues. Although I have UAC set to "Never notify" in Control Panel, I find that certain activities are still fettered by UAC. For example, Windows Explorer doesn't let me create a file in certain folders, such as C:.

I use the Command Prompt quite a lot. In Windows 7, with UAC turned to "Never notify", Command Prompt automatically started as Administrator; whereas under Windows 10 I have to explicitly right-click and choose "Run as Administrator". More annoyingly, when I connect to the Windows 10 machine from another PC, using NET USE with my username for the target machine, I don't have access to do anything in folders that need admin access. I haven't found a workaround for this.

Is there a way to completely turn off UAC in Windows 10, so that I can do all admin tasks easily?

Klitos Kyriacou
  • 570

3 Answers3

24

I found the answer myself.

WARNING: This is not generally recommended as it compromises system security. Only do this if you know what you are doing.

Using the Control Panel UAC setting only does half the job. To turn off UAC completely, go to 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

and change the value EnableLUA to 0.

Do what you need to do, and then set it back to 1 to avoid endangering system security for too long.

Klitos Kyriacou
  • 570
1

You can completely disable UAC in Windows 7 and up, including all versions of Windows 10 (up to 22H2 as of writing this) through the group policy editor (gpedit.msc) or local security policy editor (secpol.msc).

Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies -> Security Options -> User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode

Change this policy to Disabled and restart the PC. UAC is now completely disabled and user accounts behave how they did back in Windows XP and earlier.

The group policy editor is not available in the Home edition of Windows 10, but it's there in all other editions. If you have the Home edition, there are hacks on how to enable it. You could also use a third party policy editor like Policy Plus.

I know this is an old question, but it still ranks high in google and did not provide an adequate answer for newer versions of Windows 10.

Kidades
  • 315
0

This registry settings work in Windows 10. Copy the next section in notepad, save it with .reg extension, and double click it to merge.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin"=dword:0
"EnableLUA"=dword:1
"PromptOnSecureDesktop"=dword:0

Further details::

Biswapriyo
  • 11,584