[Windows 8 General] GoodDayToDie:
No I'm not a god, but I am a computer security professional, as well as a volunteer tech support provider. People who make claims such as the one you did above make my job a lot harder, and are responsible for a lot of harm in the world. I hold MS partially responsible for this, as it was their stupidity in making the first account created an Admin by default which led people down this path (well, that and making an OS without user permissions at all) but at least they're trying to correct those past mistakes (discontinuing Win9x for the latter and adding UAC for the former). I do not appreciate (and will call out) people trying to revert this progress!

Your post is logically inconsistent. You insist that you want UAC off, then you go and enable *THE* security policy that that turns it on again. I didn't suggest that you "want" it on at all; I merely stated that you are so unfamiliar with how Windows works that you turned it on yourself. Apparently, you also have trouble with reading comprehension.

Perhaps you are confused about the difference between UAC (the entire feature that is a component of the Windows NT 6.x security system, and includes split tokens, Admin Approval Mode, and elevation prompts, among other things) and the particular sub-component that is the elevation prompts caused by Admin Approval Mode being configured to require approval before granting a full-security token? I can understand (although I do not agree with) the desire to modify this configuration. That is why I provided the steps to do so. Do not confuse them (or what you yourself did) with disabling UAC as a whole, however!

I'd *love* to hear of a third-party program that "works" to secure a Windows machine running as Admin against zero-day threats. Really, I would. You could write a bloody PhD dissertation out of such a piece of software, because that's currently believed to be literally impossible. Windows RT can't do it, AppLocker can't do it, and you can be quite sure that third parties can't do it, not and leave anything that can still be called "Windows" behind.

Even running as a non-Admin isn't going to fully secure the machine; where a zero-day in a user process won't be able to compromise the machine by itself, it could still do quite a bit of harm, and if there's a second vulnerability providing EoP from user to admin or kernel, or if the zero-day is in a high-privilege process already, then you're screwed. There's *still* no software, third-party or otherwise, that will protect you against such things though. The best you can do is defense in depth. In order of increasing (low to high) importance:

1. use multiple firewalls (such as a hardware firewall)

2. use frequently-updated anti-virus (ranked low because it's an inherently reactive defense, not a proactive one)

3. use an OS with strong exploit mitigations (pretty much anything since XP, though they keep getting better)

4. avoid monoculture (if there are multiple equally secure options, it's best to use the least-used one... but be aware that the lesser-used options are not always secure even if they get exploited less frequently)

5. patch regularly and promptly

6. limit your attack surface (disable features and plugins you don't need, block ads, etc.)

7. don't run as Admin

8. use sandboxed applications (on Windows, this requires not running as full Admin).

Items 7 and 8 are part of a core tenet of security, the principle of least privilege. It has been applied to computer security for decades (ever hear of a system called MULTICS? It was all about this, with eight different hardware-enforced levels of privilege. Modern PCs have four such levels, and most OSes only use two of them). It applies in the real world as well; you may be familiar with the concept of "need to know"? Assume everything *could* act maliciously, and limit the damage it could cause if it does.

There are more items which I could add to the list to provide even greater security, such as using virtualization for untrusted software (basically a bigger sandbox), or air-gapping vital systems, or so on. That's beyond the scope of what most people can reasonably be expected to do with a personal computing device, though. Also, note that this isn't a "if you do X, you don't have to do X-1" list; running AV is still a good idea, even though the actual degree of protection provided is low.

Also, that all is for protection against attacks which don't require the user doing something stupid (except for turning off the protection...). For defenses against things like Trojans, AV becomes more important, but the really critical element there is simply "be smart about security" (which sadly is apparently beyond most people, given the stuff I see every day).

This is getting off-topic; the methods required to achieve the stated goal have been given.