Solo Technology

Posted on August 24, 2008   No Comments

I generally enjoy running Vista on my home PC. It does what I want, how I want, when I want. I dual-boot between it and Ubuntu and frankly, as far as user experience goes, they’re darned close to the same for me.

Well, except for Vista’s “Run as Administrator” option. There are some odd wrinkles with this that caused me a few minutes of extreme confusion this morning.

For instance, I’m back to playing EverQuest (an 8+ year on/off love affair). To launch EQ, I need to right-click on the short-cut and choose the “Run as Administrator” option.

That then results in the User Access Control dialog where I have to click on the equivalent of “Yeah really, I clicked it. I want it.” and then the game launches.

Not the end of the world, but I was thinking maybe I should be able to streamline away those extra clicks. I right-clicked on the short-cut to inspect properties and thought I saw something that would help on the Compatibility tab:

Alas, when I started it up I got:

Now, to me, that was definitely not an expected result of checking the “Run as Administrator” option. It didn’t actually change a darned thing.

Back to the properties dialog. On the Shortcut tab, I clicked the “Advanced…” button and found this:

Now, how many different ways are there to run as Admin?!? That one works though. When I launch the short-cut by a double click I immediately get the UAC prompt.

Success. Mostly.

I saved a right-click and selection at any rate so I guess I can say I streamlined it.

And yes, I know that I could disable the UAC prompts. But I’m not going to.

Tags: Administrator, Everquest, security, UAC, vista

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