UAC (User Access Control) in Windows Vista or Windows 7 got you down? It gets me down all the time too! We’re going to show you how to make a shortcut that when launched will run a program as administrator and bypass the UAC prompt! This is need to know stuff!
A little background on UAC. UAC stands for User Access Control is part of Microsoft’s new “feature” to keep your system more secure and less prone to malware, virus and spyware infections. It works by prompting the user for permission anytime a system change is going to be made that requires elevating the user to administrator.
If you have a program or change you make very often (in our example regedit.exe) there’s a simple trick you can pull on Windows that allows you to run a shortcut without being prompted by UAC. It involves scheduling a task and having that task kick off your program as administrator without UAC! If it sounds difficult, don’t worry, it isn’t!
Create a new scheduled task
The first thing we need to do is create a new scheduled task. Navigate to your Control Panel, open Administrative Tools and then double-click Task Scheduler (Click Start –> Click Control Panel –> Click Administrative Tools –> Click Task Scheduler). Once on this screen click Create Task.
Give the task a short, simple name, without spaces in it. Now check the box for “Run with highest privileges”. If you forget to check this box, none of this will work.
Click on the Actions tab, click the New button, and then browse down to the application that you are trying to start.
Close out of the dialogs by clicking the OK button. You should now see a new task in the task list. Right-click on your new task and choose “Run”. It should launch the application.
Pretty easy right? We’re half way there! That’s the scheduled task portion of our exercise. Remember the name of your scheduled task (exactly as you spelled it) for the next section. Go ahead and close out of the scheduled task window.
Create a Shortcut to run your new scheduled task
Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose New –> Shortcut from the menu.
It turns out there is a command that will run the scheduled task, passing in the name of the task that we want used. In our example we used runregedit as the name for the task.
Enter the task name of your task in place of the runregedit in quotes.
schtasks /run /tn "runregedit"
Give your shortcut a name, and then click next to create it.
That’s it! You’re all done! It’s really that simple!
Is there a way to bypass UAC for apps that are launched from a link in a web browser?
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