If I ever make a fresh installation of Windows Vista on my machine I make sure the first thing that I do is to disable UAC (User Account Control). It’s pretty annoying and more over I consider myself as a power user who knows what he is doing on his Vista machine. However, there can be incidents when you should leave the UAC controls on. Let’s say for example your computer is shared and is being used by people who are pretty naive about Windows. A kid for example.

The other day I was using someone’s laptop and I went to command prompt by running it from the Run window and when I was trying to execute some ipconfig related commands I got the prompt that I need admin rights. So, I thought for a while because I am not used to working under UAC enabled Vista machine. But it was more of logic than anything else to be able to run command prompt under admin privileges. This is what I did.

1. Click the Vista Start button.

2. Type command in the “Start Search” box.

3. You’ll see Command Prompt appearing under programs in your search.

4. Just right click on the command prompt and click “Run as administrator“

runasadmin

This should open the command prompt with elevated admin rights. And you’ll be able to run and execute any command which require admin rights!