I'm sure most of you know about Windows Vista's User Account Control. I was wondering if there were any registry settings or anything that I could modify to force the UAC prompt to appear when doing these tasks:

• Clicking the Start button
• Opening any folder
• Launching any application
• Adjusting personalization settings
• Opening a new page in Internet Explorer (by that I mean typing in a URL, from Favourites or by clicking a link)
• Turning off, sleep or restarting the computer
• Modifying the Windows Sidebar
• Opening any file (mp3, document, anything)

There's probably more things I want to trigger the UAC prompt that I can't think of right now, but that is the most of it. Is there anything I can do to allow this behaviour in Windows?

wow, what are you trying to do ? Make someone crazy or something ?
Maybe you can set the triggers using the mmc (start>run>mmc)?

I absolutely LOVE User Account Control!! It's one of the better things put into Windows Vista. Once I can get more triggers in I'll use a limited account to do most things instead of my normal administrative account.

I'll try using Microsoft Management Console and see how that works.

You're the only person I know that is hyping up this function. It's great in theory and the only operating system family that I see it working the best is on UNIX. Microsoft's catching up, but there are just so many bugs in that system, it's not recommendable to use it every instance. However, I recommend leaving it on because without it Windows is worse without it. That's why I like UNIX's sudo function instead.

The reason why UAC can't do the things you're doing right now is because the actions you listed above doesn't warrant a required Administrator access to the files, folders or actions. This is the only way you can invoke the UAC to pop up. Like if the UAC pops up every time the start button is pressed, I'll lose my mind since sometimes I hit the Windows key by accident when playing a game. Then having the game minimized and the UAC popping up, thus lagging my machine, I'll definitely lose my mind because that's precious minute gone ... especially that's disastrous online.

Anyways, goodluck with that.... and I thought Microsoft was out to annoy us with the default settings of UAC *rollseyes*.

xboxrulz

All other items I agree you action except the start button.
Personally, I don't see anything on that related with security issue.
May I ask you reason ?

I have no firm proof but my guess is that no you can’t make UAC pop up for arbitrary reasons. The reason is that UAC is a protected function and can in theory only be accessed by the operating system. When the UAC prompt is displayed you are actually seeing a different protected desktop that only has a screen capture of your user desktop underneath. The UAC prompt is displayed at some of the lowest levels of Vista and is currently unavailable to the average programmer.

The reason is that if I were a malware author that wanted to get my software installed on a UAC protected system, I would just change some registry settings before I started the install. (This is a famous problem with the SP2 firewall because you can simply add a rule by adding a registry entry.) If that didn’t work I would then make a program that took control of the mouse and then move the mouse to the UAC accept button and programmatically click the button thus defeating the entire concept of UAC. For this reason UAC is a very protected entity and only the operating system has access to monkeying around with it.

If there were some way to add or remove UAC features it would be in the group policy settings which you can get to from the Administrative Tools or from MMC. Group policy is usually used on corporate domains but you can set most of the settings for a stand alone machine.

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Man...licy-Part1.html

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

Keep in mind that I am running Windows Vista Home Premium, not Business or Ultimate. I may not have access to certain features on Windows Vista.

Most Windows users want to remove User Account Control (UAC), instead of enabling it on more functions. I personally think it is not practical to have the User Account Control prompt up everytime you click on the Windows start button or open a folder. The only use of this really is if you wanted to play around with someone else's computer as a joke.

I think the only possible way to change this option would be to edit some registry settings or modify the operating system itself, which would require a high level of programming knowledge and skill. Technically, Microsoft didn't really design the User Account Control to be used in such a way (It was mainly designed to protect the editing of significantly important settings and functions that could affect the operating system in terms of security) so you may not be able to set the User Account Control to do what you want it to do.

Hey xboxrulz... both Linux and Mac have sudo, right?

This post has been edited by Lancer: Sep 20 2008, 12:17 PM

If you check the Linux subforum, you can also see that I asked a similar question there regarding the use of sudo but without actually running things as root.