admin access in Vista standard user account?

W

weazle

n00b
Joined
Jul 30, 2008
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I set up a standard user account in Vista so I could run without UAC on and still have security protection. But in that account when I right click a shortcut and select "run as administrator" it doesn't actually run as administrator and does not prompt me to enter the admin password like it works on XP. This is Home Premium so I have no access to a policy editor either. Has Microsoft completely removed the ability to run something with admin access under a standard user account in Vista?

Please do not turn this into a lecture on why I should be using UAC. I just want to know if there is an option to enforce prompting of admin password so I can run an app in the standard account if I need to. I've looked and can not find any such option.
 
There is no Administrator account in Vista, period. No matter what you'll read or hear from others (even people with "friends at Microsoft") there simply isn't an Administrator level account with the types of privilege that previous versions of Windows allowed the basic "Admin" account to have. If you can't get the process elevated to Admin level privilege the way you've chosen to alter the User account you created, it's time to do things the way they're supposed to be done.

Nice to see you again, btw... ;)
 
Well, I'm still going to run it this way for a while to see how it goes. I can just go back to the "restricted" admin account to run stuff that needs admin access but do most things in standard account, and yes, with no UAC bugging me. I thought I read earlier today that if you have Business version of Vista you can change that behavior with the policy editor.
 
Yeah, not having GPEdit around anymore is a definite problem for those of us with more experience (present company included) but, that's the downside to running Home Premium. If I ever end up using Vista (fat chance of that) it'll be Vista Business. There might be a Registry edit or two that's capable of doing something similar to what you're hoping to achieve, but I couldn't say what they might be as I don't run Vista day to day.

Besides, I gave up tweaking OSes including Vista when I do load it up in a VM for testing or something specific. UAC is operational as well as everything else so I never have issues.
 
I am just doing it to see how the performance difference is (also turned off defender) and will go back to standard setup if it doesn't make much difference. I always setup a limited user account in XP so I am not really one of the people UAC was targeted at. UAC came about because most people just refused to run under limited user account in XP.
 
How about turning UAC back on, and creating one administrator and one standard user account. Then use the standard user account to log in, and when elevation is required, you'll need to enter the credentials of an administrator - the other account. I've not tried it, but it should work?

Since elevation must either be performed when a process starts or never, I don't see that it can really have any impact on speed (Defender is a different matter, though I don't know if it causes any noticeable slowdown). It's not sitting in the background waiting for programs to try to do something administrative, or anything like that.
 
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