While Windows 7 let you disable UAC by simply typing “UAC” into the search field on the start menu and disabling it from the UAC options that show up, Windows 8 made it a bit more complicated.
In short, press Windows+R, type secpol.msc, go to “Local Policies => Security Options” and set “User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin approval mode” to “Disabled”. Reboot.
Windows 8 non-pro does not have “secpol.msc”, so we have to resort to the registry. Go to Start->Run->”regedit”, go to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System” and set the value of the “EnableLUA” key to 0.
Again, reboot.
Please note: While disabling UAC in this way gives you and all applications you run complete admin rights to the machine, the equivalent of running everything as “root” on a Linux machine, it also breaks almost every single Metro app in horrible ways. Only do this if you really need to.
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