12 October 2008

Vista – Disabling UAC and LUAFV Driver (2.0)

I'm sure a lot of people suffer through the annoying time dealing with the ridiculous Windows Vista "User Account Control" also known as the 'ask before you do anything' boxes that pop up when you pretty much try to do anything with Vista. Today I'll be walking you through how to turn off that annoying popup so that you can get back to doing something more productive. Windows UAC was developed to stop programs from executing without your knowledge as a safety and security feature that is actually quite effective, but while produced with noble intentions Microsoft created a monster that was unfit for a Mary Shelley novel as the overbearing UAC prompts you multiple times to open a program or if that program in turn opens another program. Myself being someone who's on the computer a lot I really couldn't deal with it so I turned it off pretty much right away. The problem with this is that when I started Windows up again my boot up was noticeably (45 seconds – 1 minute) longer. Searching through the internet I found that some people experience this after turning UAC off and it can be remedied by turning off the driver that enables its function (LUAFV) today we'll walk through turning off both of these features as to maximize your performance and minimize the strife. This is rated at a 2.0 because there is a possibility while editing the single registry value that you need to edit that you will somehow mysteriously and magically corrupt your computer. It's a long shot but if you don't know anything about computers I wouldn't recommend trying at least the driver part, you should be fine with disabling UAC. This entire process should take less than five minutes and WILL make your computer less secure. You have been warned.

First things first open your start menu and click on control panel, when your control panel menu comes up click the search box and type "UAC" or "User Account Control". Hit search and the option under "User accounts" should read "Turn User Account Control on or Off" Click this option and then in the next screen uncheck the box that says "Use User Account Control" and then hit OK. You'll be prompted for a restart and if you don't plan on changing the registry value then you should. If you're sticking around to turn off LUAFV then see the paragraph below.

Disabling LUAFV requires only one value change in the registry and can be done in less than a minute. First open your start menu and click on the search tab in the bottom in that box type "Command Prompt" and the command prompt shortcut will popup. Click the shortcut and type "regedit" there will be things preceding this (a directory) but it doesn't matter. The registry editor will come up and you simply navigate through HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/luafv. Once you get into this directory open the "Start" value and change it to 4 this disables the loading of LUAFV and should reduce boot time by around 30 seconds. I hope this helps!

Nantau