The Windows Vista User Account Control feature has been designed to stop your computer being affected by malware and prompts you for authorization before carrying out things such as putting on new software or making a change to the computer’s settings.

While the idea behind this is sound enough, in reality it can get a bit annoying after a while and will cause you to spend more time doing simple things than you would otherwise take.

To turn off this feature go into the Control Panel and then go into User Accounts and Family Safety followed by User Accounts. Here you will see the option to Turn User Account Control On or Off. A click here take you to the place where ticking or unticking the box will change the settings.

The official Microsoft advice is not to take turn off the User Account Control, but there are some parts of it you can deactivate without fear. For example, you can stop it blacking out your screen before it does some tasks. This is an option on Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate editions and you do it in the following way.

Go into group policy by choosing Start then Run then gpedit.msc. Now you need to go to Computer Configuration followed by Windows Setting and then Security Settings followed by Local Policies and then Security Options. Here you can look for the policy called User Account Control: Switch to the secure desktop when prompting for elevation. If you put this to disabled then you will get rid of the rather annoying black out feature.

If you want more PC improvements like we mentioned in this article why not try our award winning PC Speed Up that optimizes your PC in 3 clicks