How in the Tech

Create Shortcuts to Bypass UAC in Vista

By Adam Myers ⋅ September 4, 2008 ⋅ Tags: Annoyances, Security

User Account Control. UAC, that lovely feature in Vista that is designed to protect us from ourselves. Sarcasm aside, I do admire what UAC is trying to accomplish even though the general perception of the feature is quite negative – as everyone likes to ignore that OS X and Linux have the exact same procedure. The one problem I do have with UAC is that the number of prompts are excessive – there are few operations that require two or three confirmation clicks to accomplish (like overwriting a file in C:\Program Files\ through Windows Explorer). Secondly, it would be swell to have an option to never prompt on this application again where certain programs could be white-listed, meaning UAC wouldn’t be used. I do a lot of Registry tips on this site and regedit.exe is one of the programs that always initiates the UAC prompt as the program requires Admin rights. Fair enough, but I don’t need that on every launch. Thankfully, I have found a way around this but I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether the hoops one must jump through are worth it.

We are going to create a scheduled task to run an application in Admin mode, then creating a shortcut to run the task on demand.

1. Open Task Scheduler from the Vista Start Menu search box.
2. Select Create Task.



3. Give the task a unique Name and be sure to check the box next to Run with highest privileges.



4. On the Actions tab of the same window is where we will path to the program we wish to execute in Admin mode.



5. OK out of the dialog windows to return to the initial Task Scheduler window. You should see your newly created task in the Library. Right click on the task and choose Run to ensure everything executes as desired.



6. Now that our scheduled task is configured correctly, we want to create a shortcut to this task. The quickest method to create a shortcut is by right clicking on your Desktop and selecting New->Shortcut.
7. From the Create Shortcut Wizard the location of the item will be schtask /run /tn “taskname” – in my example we called it runwoopra.



8. Name the shortcut something appropriate and complete the wizard. You should see your shortcut on your desktop, where you can now move it to wherever you see fit.