As a Domain Admin for a small or large corporation, it’s NEVER a good idea to log in as the Domain Admin (or another privileged user) to read email or surf the Internet. After all, if you pick up 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 log in 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, 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!
15 Comments
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Taz
Thanks a million for saving me mucho time…
bla
didt work for me. nothing shows up at all when right clicking
MrGroove
@bla, Did you hold down the SHIFT button when you right clicked on the file?
sean
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?
sean
erm..problem solved, sorry about that, but thank anyway for the shellrunas info, was really helpful
MrGroove
@sean, No problem Sean. Welcome to the groovyPost community. What turned out to be your problem in comment 5?
Will
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?
MrGroove
@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?
Will
@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 :)
MrGroove
@Will,
Anytime and Welcome to the site!
Balihai
Thank you MARK! You have once again you shown why all bow before you.
Pcobiwan
This is a nice idea, but it needs to be set up while you are already an Administrator (system32 is a protected folder in Vista). I most often end up using ‘Run as another user’ when remote end-users get infected. Several online scanning tools require admin rights to install but won’t accept them unless you use ‘Run as another user’ and put in your domain admin creds that way.
Dassie
I can/could not run “Real Temp” (to measure the core temp of my self-built “Core i5” CPU) as normal user. This trick did it. Brilliant of Mark Russinovich (and as stupid of MS as usual… for having removed the Run-As command, which I still use very often in XP Home).
Thank you very much, Mr.Groove. A great help!
Dassie
Uhh, or not… Followed the procedure above, with the same messages as result, but there is no “Run as” in the context menu, only still the “Run as Administrator”… How come?
Darn you, Microsoft, for Windows Vista.
wha
interesting shell. however this is user specific. when shellrunas /reg as me then i get the context entry. however other users for the OS do not. They also have to use shellrunas /reg .