One of the most annoying aspects of Windows 7 (I find) is that lots of software doesn’t autostart or autorun properly. Let me explain with an example … do you use Piriform’s excellent ccleaner?
Do you use it the same way as I do – by right-clicking on my recycle bin?
If so, are you fed up with Windows 7 asking you for permission to run it?
This is the UAC in action.
Then the answer is that you need to run the item as an administrator and Windows 7 gives us have five options to do that – though not all would necessarily work for all situations and some will still ask you to confirm you are the admin or want to run as admin.
1. By using a keyboard shortcut - however this won’t work for software like ccleaner where you don’t have a shortcut you can run (though you can create one) – press and hold Ctrl + Shift while opening the program.
2. You can right-click the program and select the “run as administrator” from the context menu.
3. Use compatibility mode which you can set to always allow a specific app to run as admin. I find the easiest way to do this is to find the program executable and right-click it, select properties, find the ‘compatability mode’ tab and tick the box that says ‘run as administrator’.
4. Configure the programs advanced properties. To do this right-click the program (or icon), find the shortcut tab and click on advanced and as with item 3 click on the ‘run as administrator’ box.
5. Finally we can create a shortcut with elevated ‘run as administrator’ status and combine this with task scheduler to run any app in an elevated mode without the UAC popping up. But we’ll leave that one for another time or even another site.
OK – so let’s bring this full circle.
For my purposes I wanted to run ccleaner without UAC popping up – ever. The options that allow me to do this are 3 and 4 above. Option 5 will allow me to set a scheduled task to run in admin mode whilst options 1 and 2 will do this on an ad-hoc basis.
However, options 3 and 4 allow me to set an app to run for any user whatever their level of access.
