Vista UAC
Workaround
Michael Otey mentions the
annoyance of frequent User
Accounts Control (UAC)
prompting in his Top 10
column (“Windows Vista
Annoyances,” January 2008,
InstantDoc ID 97490). I share
his pain. However, I’ve found
an interesting fix for the UAC
problem.
The reason for all the
prompting is that the application
in question is being
started by the desktop shell
(explorer.exe). Winlogon.exe
starts explorer.exe as a nonadministrative
process. If you
can get explorer.exe to run as
an administrative process, any
application that it starts won’t
get the UAC prompt. One solution
is to create a file named
ElevateExplorer.cmd with the
following two lines:
taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
start C:\Windows\explorer.exe
Then, create a shortcut icon
on your desktop to execute
ElevateExplorer.cmd, and set
its properties to make it run in
the context of an administrator.
Now, each time you log on,
double-click the ElevateExplorer
icon. Of course,
the invocation of
ElevateExplorer.cmd
will cause a UAC
prompt. However,
once ElevateExplorer.
cmd is finished
running, it
will have killed the
copy of explorer.
exe that was running
as a nonadministrator and will have
started a new explorer.exe
instance, which will now be
running as an administrator.
Using this method, all the
applications that you start from either the desktop, Start
menu, or task bar will run as
an administrator—with no
UAC prompt. This state stays
in effect until you log off. If you
want to revert back to the normal
mode, just log off and log
on again.
—Ron Wright
PowerShell’s
Virtues
I read Robert Sheldon’s “Power-
Shell 101, Lesson 1” (February
2008, InstantDoc ID 97742),
and I think it’s great that Windows
IT Pro is bringing the virtues
of Microsoft’s PowerShell
to light. I’m an Oracle DBA
who just finished migrating to
Windows. In my former UNIX
environment, I used scripting
heavily because it was both
a time saver and a necessity
when scheduling tasks via
CRON. I do rely on GUI tools
to some extent, but I still prefer
the speed and simplicity of
scripts.
PowerShell is now a key
part of my migration methodology.
The ease of scripting at
an object level along with the
plethora of cmdlets gave me
the opportunity to develop
and implement new tools
for my environment that are
far more powerful and flexible
than anything I had with
UNIX. Combining PowerShell with Oracle’s command-line
tools has let me create SQL
and RMAN scripts on-the-fly
to perform reporting, maintenance,
service monitoring,
and backup tasks quickly and
easily. Drop your batch scripts,
and move to PowerShell. It
truly rocks!
—Stephen Morgan
We appreciate your feedback,
Stephen. Stay tuned as Robert
Sheldon continues his series
of six PowerShell 101 articles. You can tackle Lesson 3 in this
issue, page 39. And Robert has
already begun writing a Power-
Shell 201 series!
—Amy Eisenberg
Too Much Server
2008 and Vista
I love your magazine, but lately
it seems you’re covering only
Windows Server 2008 and
Windows Vista. These are cool
products, but how much of
your reader base actually plans
to install/use them in the next
few months? Shouldn’t you
dedicate some pages to existing
software such as Windows
Server 2003 and Exchange
Server? I need articles that
can help me with my current
environment.
—Robert Singer
Thank you for writing. You’ve
touched on one of the most difficult
parts of our job as editors.
In every issue, we try to balance
coverage of new technology
with solutions you can implement
today. At the same time,
we want to include both novice
and advanced topics and topics
that are appropriate to small,
medium, and large IT environments.
Incidentally, when we
surveyed our readers in September
2007, 14 percent of survey
respondents had installed
the Server 2008 beta at their
workplace. Nearly 40 percent of
survey respondents noted that
they planned to migrate to the
new server OS within a year of
its release. That said, feedback
from readers like you is crucial
to us meeting your needs. Please
write to me at letters@windows
itpro.com and tell me what
you’d like to see! If you prefer to
make your comments online,
we do review the feedback we
receive on every article.
—Amy Eisenberg