[xplorer˛] — RunAs made easy
home » blog » 3 February 2008


"I haven't got milliseconds to spare"

If you know how to read, write and count, you know it makes sense to to run as a restricted user for everyday tasks, keeping the internet nasties at bay. As we saw the other day there is a snag with this policy: if you want to run a program with administrator credentials, say an installer, you have to go through the — let's call a spade a spade — tedium of right clicking on shortcuts to unearth the Run as (administrator for vista) context menu command.

If you are like me, you are psychologically addicted to saving time and even the slightest improvement counts. Here's one that will shave milliseconds off your RunAs tasks <g>: there's an option in advanced properties page of each shortcut to "Run with different credentials". If you check this box, when you click the shortcut it will pop up the run as user dialog, no extra clicks or menus required!

On the technical side, this functionality is offered through an obscure shell interface called IShellLinkDataList, which can turn on the SLDF_RUNAS_USER property of a shortcut. It mostly makes sense for shortcuts you always want to start with elevated credentials.

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