Automatically Launch UAC Restricted Programs at Startup in Windows 7
// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Home
Some people noticed from the screenshot for Everything in my previous post that I did not seem to use Windows XP. The screenshot was, in fact, taken from my Windows 7 machine. This led me to another interesting thought. If you have installed Everything on your Windows 7 (or Vista) machine, you would notice two things. The first is that the program does not launch at startup (meaning, it takes a few seconds to update the index each time you launch it manually). The second is that Everything wants admin access, meaning UAC comes in the way each time.
Well, those two observations are sort of related, as Windows Vista and 7 block programs from launching automatically at start up, if they require admin access. While some of you are thinking UAC annoyance, my thought is more towards “good security feature”. I actually appreciate this feature. The irritating part comes when apps that you know and trust don’t launch the way you want them to, as is the case with Everything.
Well, there is a work-around that takes a 5-minute one-time setup. But before I proceed with giving you the details, I must stress that UAC does serve a purpose and that you need to do the following only with a limited and strict set of apps that you really trust and need to launch with admin access at startup.
I am not going to list the steps one by one here, since there is already an excellent article by Greg Shultz, up on TechRepublic, where he details the steps with screenshots and explanations. He uses Event Viewer (a built-in Windows app) in his example, and consequently, in his last step (Figure F on his post), the shortcut for the app is given as C:WindowsSystem32eventvwr.msc. You would obviously replace this with the full path of the app that you want to launch (in the default installation of Everything, for instance, it would be C:Program FilesEverythingEverything.exe). The other is that he uses Windows Vista in his example, but it works just the same in Windows 7 as well.
Click here to head on over to TechRepublic to read Greg’s post.
