I recently installed Vista on my pc however i cannot figure out where to turn off the windos user access control thing. It is prtty annoying keeps asking me to allow or deny anthing i do. I checked everywhere. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks from B4.

Please take the time to understand why UAC is there. If it's asking you to continue and is not prompting you for a password, you are running with an account with administrative privileges. If you turn off UAC, then ANY PROGRAM you run has admin privileges to your machine, and therefore any successful attacks through those applications gain those rights to your machine. Let's say you're surfing the internet, and someone embeds a hack in a webpage that attacks Firefox or Internet Explorer, and let's say the attack is to install spyware on your machine, or a keystroke logger, or an IRC backdoor to remote control your machine and make your computer a part of their zombie fleet. Since you disabled UAC and ran your browser as an admin, the attack runs with admin credentials, and therefore will be successful since admin = god on your machine. Had you left UAC on, Vista builds two tokens when you run as admin, a limited user token and an admin token. When applications are launched, unless coded otherwise to prompt immediately for admin privileges, the program runs with limited privileges, and you will be prompted when the program needs admin rights only. So in this case, with UAC on, you'd be prompted to continue because the hack is attempting to install something, which it needs admin privileges to do. Hopefully, you'd realize there's no reason your browser would out of nowhere need admin rights, and you'd not click continue. Without UAC on, you wouldn't be prompted, you're hacked. This is why worms are successfully spread through instant messenger apps, web browsers, email clients, office products, etc. That's why UAC was put in place because an increasing amount of attacks are attacks within commonly used applications that there was never a need to run them with full admin privileges. Do you order things online with a credit card? Imagine the time wasting and frustration you'd go through if a hacker got your credit card number because they were able to trivially install a keystroke logger on your machine, and you never had the opportunity to stop them. Imagine getting knocked offline by your ISP because your machine is has become a spambot by a hacker without you ever getting a chance to stop the installation of the hack. I could keep going on and on with examples of all the hacks that happen on a daily basis because users run with full admin privileges on XP machines, or in Vista with UAC turned off. It might be annoying, but it is a very important layer of defense for your computer's security. Leave it on! TECH-NO-LOGICAL ROMANCE! http://www.homestarrunner.com/tgs12.html

First I suggest you heed heropsycho's admonition. If you still don't care about the importance of leaving UAC enabled, do so using any one of the 4 methods explained HERE - at your own risk. The choice is yours. Good luck. UPDATED: I have re-read MVP Daniel Petri's article once again. He made a very good exception when you may need to temporarily disable UAC without any consequence. One example is when you are giving demos in front of an audience (you won't feel comfy forcing them to watch the UAC popups, you know). Aside from that, Daniel fully echo heropsycho's admonitions. i_XpUser