As a Domain Admin for a small or large corporation, it’s NEVER a good idea to login as the Domain Admin (or other privileged user) to read email or surf the Internet. After all, if you pickup a nasty bug/virus, from Outlook or Internet Explorer your logged in credentials will have the ability to spread the virus to every system in the company… Not a good thing!
That’s where the RunAs command (XP and Server 2003) came in handy over the years. You could login as a non-privileged user but if you needed to do something which required Admin rights, you could hold down Shift and Right Click on the application in Windows Explorer and start the application using your Admin credentials.
With the release of Windows Vista and Server 2008, this all changed. True, you could still use the RunAs.exe from the command line however, if you wanted to do it with Windows Explorer. Fortunately Mark Russinovich has written a new tool called ShellRunAs which adds the RunAs feature to Windows Explorer.
Follow the below Step by Step to get it rolling on your box:
Add Run As Different User to Windows Explorer Context Menu for Vista and Server 2008
1) After you download ShellRunAs from here, copy it to your WindowsSystem32 folder,
2) Open a command line and Run: shellrunas /reg
3) Click OK to confirm Install completed
To test, hold down SHIFT and Right-Click on an application. You should now see the Run as different user in your context menu.
Before:
After:
VERY Groovy little tool! Thanks Mark!
Thanks a million for saving me mucho time…
[...] http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microsoft/vista/add-runas-to-explorer-context-menu-in-vista-and-serv... [...]
didt work for me. nothing shows up at all when right clicking
@bla, Did you hold down the SHIFT button when you right clicked on the file?
[...] That worked for me in this instance. But I wanted something more convenient. My seraches turned up this article on Groovypost which explains one way to get your content menu command back. Double [...]
it did work for me, after i clicked run as different user, it requires me to enter credentials to use for, however, its keeps denying the user i entered, any solutions to this?
erm..problem solved, sorry about that, but thank anyway for the shellrunas info, was really helpful
@sean, No problem Sean. Welcome to the groovyPost community. What turned out to be your problem in comment 5?
G’day MrGroove. I went to the download site and it tells me that “it’s not convenient if you’re a heavy Explorer user”.
Why would this be? What do they mean by this?
I am interested in installing this on my terminal server which has around 100 remote users working within it at any one time all using explorer to access documents, etc.
Do you recommend this for my sitchuation?
@Will,
Hi Will. No worries. I think you might have misunderstood what he was saying. I personally had to read it a few times to catch it.
What he was saying was you can use the default RunAs command line tool UNLESS your a heavy Explorer user and in that case, you should download the tool and use it. He wasn’t saying don’t use it if your a heavy explorer users. Actually the opposite.
Make sense?
@MrGroove,
Thanks for the swift reply. Was interested in using this for a few services to Run As. But was worried that it would affect all my remote desktop users that log onto that server.
I’ll give it a try. Cheers for your help
@Will,
Anytime and Welcome to the site!