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
