Elevated Command Prompt Shortcut

GrayGhost2 said:

Thank you Brink for another excellent tutorial. :)

Warning
You must be logged in as an administrator to be able to use this shortcut.

As the 's advocate ...
With an elevated cmd-prompt shortcut , ie "Run as Administrator" ... why would I need to be logged in as Admin to use the shortcut. ?

Without having experimented with an elevated shortcut, what is the point of an elevated shortcut if it can only be used when logged in as administrator.
If logged in as admin, wouldn't opening the cmd.exe default to Administrator.

I would like to open an elevated cmd-prompt from my user account using the elevated shortcut.

Sorry to be difficult ... I am not questioning the human logic ... but the OS/security logic.

---------------
SPECS:
Toshiba Satellite C665
OS:= Windows 7 Home Premium (32-bit), sp1 (Build 7601) OEM
UI:=Classic Shell Start + Classic Explorer
Windows Indexing = disabled
Security settings for C:\
System ... (full control:=ON)
Administrators (Owner-PC\Administrators) ... (full control:=OFF)
Users (Owner-PC\Users) ... (full control:=OFF)

No problem. Here's why. :)

Nope. An administrator account is not an elevated account like the built-in elevated "Administrator" account. An administrator account behaves the same way as a standard user until you want to run something elevated (Run as administrator).

If you are logged in to an administrator account and "Run as Administrator", you will be prompted by UAC to click on Yes/No to approve by default.

If you are logged in to a standard user account and "Run as Administrator", you will be prompted by UAC to enter an administrator's password to approve by default.

Thus, either way, you must be logged in as an administrator to "Run as Administrator".

If you like, you could also use the method in the tutorial below to run an elevated command prompt in a standard user account without being prompted by UAC.

Elevated Program Shortcut - Create for Standard User

GrayGhost2 said:

I would like to open an elevated cmd-prompt from my user account using the elevated shortcut.

Have you tried creating the shortcut for the elevated cmd and then either leaving it on your desktop or pinning it to your taskbar?

There are several options to do that here: Shortcut - Create for a File, Folder, Drive, or Program in Windows The one way you may be comfortable with is Option Four.

• Copy/type/paste this C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe into the Location box in step #2.

• It will skip step #'s 3 and 4, and go directly to step #5 where you can give your new shortcut a name that suits you.

• Click on Finish and see your new shortcut on your desktop.

• You can either leave it on the desktop or right click it to open the context menu, where you can pin it to the Taskbar or the Start Menu.

Depending on how you have your User Account Control set you will still have to OK it unless you have it set to Never Notify which is dangerous to do.


After creating the first part of this post I saw this which might be better: Elevated Program Shortcut without UAC Prompt - Create

Pyprohly said:

Referring to Option 2, Step 2, it may be shorter and nicer looking to use the %ComSpec% system environment variable over %windir%\System32\cmd.exe as the target.

Thank you. I added it to step 2 in Option 2 as another choice. :)