General discussion
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Topic
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A possible consequence of disabling UAC (User Account Control)
LockedI have just discovered a possible reason for a problem that I (and many others) had been experiencing with Google installing it’s Chrome browser into a user’s data location instead of the standard ‘Program Files’ or ‘Program Files (x86)’.
If this is true, and I haven’t done any tests on this yet to verify, partial apologies to Google for all the negative comments as they have to work with Windows with all its foibles, but only partial because they didn’t tell us…..
Apparently, as previously noted I haven’t proven this yet, if you disable the awful UAC (User Account Control), then sometimes (it seems random somehow, although computers are not supposed to behave randomly), a user will not be treated as having Administrative privileges. One consequence of this is that, any installer program trying to create sub folders in ‘Program Files’ or ‘Program Files (x86)’, will be blocked and so the installer will just go to a location it knows it can use – hence installation into the user data files folder.
The way around this is to run the setup/install program with Admin privileges. Usually right-click on the executable file and choose the option.
Summary:
1) User disables UAC – usually done after installation of Windows. Users may not be aware of this as many PC builders – possibly all – do this automatically when installing Windows for their customers.
2) Installer program (such as Google Chrome) is blocked from installing into the standard program files locations (ie can’t create sub-folders)
3) Installer program installs into a location which grants privileges to install (create sub-folders) – they always seem to go for the user data folder (location)NOTE This should only be a problem on 64 bit Windows.
I’d be interested in other people’s experiences regarding this.