How to work on UAC when installing XAMPP

FlippingCoin picture FlippingCoin · Oct 14, 2014 · Viewed 119.1k times · Source

I am installing Xampp to my computer but when i tried to install it a dialog box is showing up. how do i fix this one.. thank you so much for the help.! the dialog Box:

Important! Because an activated User Account Control (UAC) on your system some functions of XAMPP are possibly restricted.

With UAC please avoid to install XAMPP to C:\Program Files(Missing Write permissions). Or Deactivate UAC with msconfig after this setup.

Answer

Yevgeniy Afanasyev picture Yevgeniy Afanasyev · May 13, 2015

This is a specific issue for Windows Vista, 7, 8 (and presumably newer).

User Account Control (UAC) is a feature in Windows that can help you stay in control of your computer by informing you when a program makes a change that requires administrator-level permission. UAC works by adjusting the permission level of your user account.

This is applied mostly to C:\Program Files. You may have noticed sometimes, that some applications can see files in C:\Program Files that does not exist there. You know why? Windows now tend to have "C:\Program Files" folder customized for every user. For example, old applications store config files (like .ini) in the same folder where the executable files are stored. In the good old days all users had the same configurations for such apps. In nowadays Windows stores configs in the special folder tied to the user account. Thus, now different users may have different configs while application still think that config files are in the same folder with the executables.

XAMPP does not like to have different config for different users. In fact it is not a config file for XAMPP, it is folders where you keep your projects and databases. The idea of XAMPP is to make projects same for all users. This is a source of a conflict with Windows.

All you need is to avoid installing XAMPP into C:\Program Files. Thus XAMPP will always use the original files for all users and there would be no confusion.

I recommend to install XAMPP into the special folder in root directory like in C:\XAMPP. But before you choose the folder you need to click on this warning message.