How to Enable Administrator Protection in Windows 11

Windows 11 introduced a feature called Administrator Protection to protect free-floating admin rights of Administrator users. You can try it now in the Windows Insider builds, but soon it will be available for all. For adding more security to User Account Control (UAC), in this article we describe how to enable Administrator Protection in Windows 11.

How to Enable Administrator Protection on Windows 11

To enable Administrator Protection for a more secure UAC in Windows 11, you can use the following two methods.

Local Group Policies Editor

Registry Editor

Herein, we will guide you through both of these methods.

The short form of "User Accounts Control". And you guys are pretty aware of this feature in Windows 11 being used for security purposes. Whenever any application is opened as run as administrator, Windows 11 presents a UAC prompt with Yes and No options. It only requires the simple click of the Yes button to give it permission for making changes by the local administrator. In the alternative, enabling the Administrator Protection option results in replacing UAC with Windows Security. The security for this particular feature will be thereby improved.

1] Local Group Policy Editor

To turn on Administrator Protection, you must change a policy setting in the Local Group Policy Editor. If you have Windows 11 Home, skip the steps below, as you don't have the Local Group Policy Editor in that version of Windows.

Open the Local Group Policy Editor and navigate to the following path:

Go to the Start menu, then Settings, Windows, Security, Local Policies, and finally to Security Options.

In the search bar, type in "User Account Control: Configure type of Admin Approval Mode" and double click it. In the pop-up menu check the option that says "Admin Approval Mode" to turn on admin protection. Hit Apply, and then OK.

Restart your computer and close the Local Group Policy Editor afterward.

2. Registry Editor

Of course, this trick works for users of Windows 11 Home, too; Registry Editor is available in all versions of Windows. Before you start, you want to make sure you back up your Registry and create a system restore point to enable you to restore your system, just in case something goes wrong.

Follow this with a 'copy' and then open the Registry Editor by pasting it into the address bar. Launch Registry Editor and hit Enter.

Local Software Registry Keys Microsoft Windows CurrentVersion Policies System

Make sure the System key is highlighted on the left-hand side of the keyboard. In the right-hand column, locate the entry entitled TypeOfAdminApprovalMode entry. If the entry does not exist create it manually.

Right-click on any free space on the right side and from the contextual menu, select New > DWORD 32-bit Value. Name the newly created value TypeOfAdminApprovalMode. Double-click this value to set 2 in the Value data field. Once you have done this, reboot your PC for changes to take effect.

To revert the changes, simply change the Value data of TypeOfAdminApprovalMode from 2 to 1 in Registry and save it.

By following the steps highlighted here, you should be able to improve the security features for your Windows 11 system by reducing unauthorized access and malicious attacks.