Allowing Windows 7 Desktop Gadgets to run with UAC off

By mike

I have no idea how I missed this – I guess I keep my desktop too cluttered up with stuff to notice? I’ve been running Windows 7 since it was released as Beta and love it. Enough so that the next laptop most likely will be a PC? (gasp!) Anyhoo, I had disabled User Account Control in Windows 7 simply because I’ve honestly never run into an issue in the past on non-UAC-enabled Windows versions like XP – read: I have no problem running everything as administrator. But disabling UAC ended up closing all my gadgets. And I’ve liked gadgets in the past and I want them back. How do you do it? Via the registry, of course.

Fire up regedit and navigate to:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ Microsoft \ Windows \ CurrentVersion \ Sidebar \ Settings

Create a new DWORD (not a 64-bit QWORD) named AllowElevatedProcess. Set that value to 1 and close regedit. No need to reboot or anything. Go back to Control Panel, and gadgetize-away.

Take this all with a grain of salt, as there are those that view this issue as a major security flaw: Sacrificing security for usability: UAC security flaw in Windows 7 beta.

Ta-da! Windows 7 Beta available for download

By mike

As in: for everyone, really. You’ll need a MS Live account (otherwise known as a Hotmail account) to retrieve an install key if you can’t find one anywhere else

**cough** piratebay **cough**

but Microsoft fixed their issues from last week and opened up their most-awaited beta to pretty much all of us. Running it right now, and it’s sa-weet…

Gizmodo has a great getting-started guide for you to check out.

Windows 7 Beta releasing today

By mike

EDIT: Microsoft hasn’t head of things like TORRENT FILES, and so their web servers imploded today. Try again next week?

If you’re like me and you hate Vista, choosing instead to stick with XP until the bitter end, I think you’ll be happy to see the arrival of Windows 7.

After having used Windows 7 for the last week or so, I can tell you it’s going to be a very important milestone for Microsoft. It’s fast, it’s stable – even for a beta! – and it has much lighter hardware requirements than the bloated beast that Vista is.

After (probably) intentionally releasing the beta into the wild via various torrent trackers, Microsoft announced that they would make Windows 7 Beta 1 available for download today – but only to the first 2.5million people.

So here I sit, hitting F5 over and over and over…