Reader Challenge January 2011

The January 2011 Challenge

In the past month I received quite a few e-mails from administrators who were moving client computers to Windows 7 and needed to continue to run legacy in-house applications. As we all know, many of these older applications require an administrator account to run. Some of my correspondents explained that the client computers were used by multiple users (depending on who needed to work with the legacy application). They said they were tired of being paged to provide the instructions for using the Run As Administrator option to launch the application when the user clicked a shortcut and the application failed to open. They wanted to know how to automate the process of running the software under the context of administrator no matter who was logged on to the computer, or which shortcut they used to launch the application. Do you know how to accomplish this?

How to Play 

Solve this month's UPDATE challenge, and you might win a prize! Email your solution (don't use an attachment) to [email protected] by February 15, 2011. You MUST include your full name, street mailing address (no P.O. Boxes), and a telephone number. Without that information, we can't send you a prize if you win, so your answer is eliminated, even if it’s correct.

I choose winners at random from the pool of correct entries. I’m a sucker for humor and originality, and a cleverly written correct answer gets an extra chance.

Because I receive so many entries each month, I can't reply to respondents, and I never respond to a request for an email receipt. Come back to this page for the correct answer in a month.

 

Answer (updated 2/15/11):

1. Right-click any shortcut to the application (or the application's listing) and choose Properties.
2. In the Properties dialog, move to the Compatibility tab.
3. To run the application as an administrator for the currently logged-on user select the option Run This Program As An Administrator and click OK.
4. To run the application as an administrator for any user of this computer click Change Settings For All Users and select the Run This Program As An Administrator option. Click OK twice.

December 2010 Reader Challenge Winner

Congratulations to Jason Milligan of Las Vegas, NV, the winner of our December 2010 Reader Challenge. The prize is a copy of Windows 7: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly Media (www.ora.com).