Welcome back! If you’ve stuck with me this long, you must actually enjoy the pain of locking down your computer and seeing what breaks! In most cases, you are probably not having any problems, but there are those situations where you might find yourself wishing you hadn’t taken my advice in the first place.

There are some normal tasks that require you to have local administrative privileges to get things done – adding a new printer, for example. So how do you accomplish this? Well, the tedious way would be to log out of your normal user account, and then log back in as an administrator, add the printer, then log out of the administrator account, and back in as your normal user account. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it?

Fortunately, there are better ways to hack this one. Unfortunately, not all of them are super-simple, owing to Microsoft’s way of managing things, but they should be an improvement over logging into and out of different accounts.

If you are running Windows XP or 2000, the preferred method would be to use the RunAs command. So, using our printer example from earlier, if you go to the Printers and Faxes icon in the Start Menu, you will see an Add Printer icon. Right-click on it, see anything interesting? Probably not, but if you hold down the “Shift” key on your keyboard, and then right-click, you should notice a new option, “Run as…” If you click on this, you will be prompted for a user name and password. Enter in the information of the local administrator account that you created, and click OK. Congratulations! You have now started the Add Printer Wizard using your powerful administrator account instead of your lowly user account.

You can also use RunAs from the command line, using the following syntax:

RUNAS /user:<UserName> <application of your choice>

You will then be prompted to enter the password for the user account.

You can find a massive amount of information on getting around without being an administrator at Aaron Margosis’ “Non-Admin” Weblog . (This link is to all posts in the “Non-admin for home users” tag.) Some of Aaron’s posts are a bit technical, but the information he provides is invaluable.  Plus he’s from Microsoft, so he knows what he’s talking about.