Create Administrator Mode Shortcuts in Windows 7 or Vista

January 17th, 2010

I was with a customer recently and we recently installed a new application for them on Windows 7, that required us to run a program as Administrator. It seemed the only way this would work was to right click on the icon and “Run as Administrator” so I wanted to find a way that this could be done without right clicking on the icon, and this is what I found, on the internet:

The best way to do this, is to create a scheduled task, and then set up a shortcut that tells the scheduled task to run. I am sure there are better ways to do this but this seems to work just fine.

Start by Creating the Scheduled Task Item

Open up Task Scheduler through the start menu search box (in Windows 7 search just type “task” without the quotes ), and then on the right-hand side click the “Create Task” link:

Now all you need to do is to give the task a name, something simple preferably without any spaces in it. Then check the box for “Run with highest privileges” (*very important*). If you are using Windows 7, click on the “Configure for” dropdown list and select the option for Windows 7.

Next , 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, which should create the new task in the list. You can right-click on it and choose “Run” at this point, simply to make sure that it launches the application the way you were expecting.

At this point our scheduled tasks setup is done, so you can close out of that if you want, as long as you remember the name that you used for the task.

Create the Shortcut to Start the Task

Right-click anywhere on the desktop and choose New \ Shortcut from the menu.

Now here is where the real magic happens, we need to add a command that will run the scheduled task, passing in the name of the task that we used. As you can see, I used runregedit as the name for the task.