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10
The Windows 7 shell (Explorer) can be made to run with Administrator privileges by this manual process:
- Kill Explorer shell by holding down Shift+Ctrl, right-clicking the Shut down button in the Start Menu, and selecting Exit Explorer
- Start Task Manager with Ctrl+Shift+Esc
- Elevate Task Manager privileges by going to Processes tab and selecting Show processes from all users
- Then start up a new instance of the shell by File | Run in Task Manager, typing in
explorer
, and selecting theCreate this task with administrative privileges
.
After following the above process, the Windows shell will be running with administrative privileges, and any programs it launches will also have administrative privileges. This makes performing tasks that require the privilege far easier, particularly for command-line applications, which usually fail silently or with an Access denied.
message rather than giving an opportunity to use UAC to elevate the process's privileges.
What I'm interested in, though, is creating an account which uses a privileged shell by default, rather than having to follow this laborious process every time. How can it be done?
@BarryKelly - old thread, but new info: On Windows 8.1, "Run as Admin" works nicely. So I have shortcut to cmd.exe, check this, and the shell even gets an orange frame. Only disappointment is that the "Start in Folder" option is not respected anymore. – virtualnobi – 2015-07-20T13:42:51.767
+1 for this and Ian Boyd highlighting a key usage - and therefore a real shortcoming in how Windows handles Administrator-privileged folders in explorer – underscore_d – 2015-08-01T19:49:40.483
@IanBoyd I'd welcome a suggestion for a better way of graphically browsing directories where you lack access. Right now I'm just trying to explore the contents of a system disk from a PC that's failed so I can back things up. Exploring via an admin PS prompt is painful mainly due to lack of thumbnails when deciding what media I want to backup. – deed02392 – 2016-07-24T11:40:29.077
Thank you very much for the information above, this will help me testing Drag&Drop while continuing to run the IDE as administrator to enable COM registration ;) – csharptest.net – 2010-08-04T18:03:23.680
9Example where this is useful. There is a folder you want to browse to that only
Administrators
have access to. You're an administrator, but not really because UAC is enabled. Normally you would simply elevate a 2nd copy of Windows Explorer, so you can then browse into that folder. Unfortunately you cannot run a 2nd copy ofexplorer.exe
elevated. So the only fix is to kill your existing copy of explorer and run a fresh copy elevated. The tedious required steps given in this question are the required steps. A better solution would be better. – Ian Boyd – 2011-07-28T19:46:19.820have you tried just opening explorer.exe properties, going to compatibility and selecting "Run as administrator"? Not in front of Win7 to try this myself. – Matt – 2009-10-22T16:50:51.900
Compatibility tab is disabled for Windows component programs. – Barry Kelly – 2009-10-22T17:08:22.817
1Isn't this exactly the same thing as disabling UAC? After all, UAC works by causing the explorer to drop its administrative privileges on startup, and then allowing you to elevate permission later on. – tylerl – 2009-11-11T07:32:43.487