How do I run control panel as administrator?
I have the following problem on my Windows 7 computer: I am a member of Administrators, but do not have full Superuser privileges. I have been told that this is by design, and that I need to explicitly "run as administrator" programs where I need Superuser privileges.
How do I do this with control panel?
Solution 1:
Before you go and do these steps, realize that running Control Panel as administrator accomplishes nothing if you're already in the administrators group. If you're an admin, any changes made in Control Panel run as administrator by default, so running the whole control.exe application as admin is redundant.
There are possible use cases for doing this if you're not an admin, however.
You should be able to run the Control Panel as administrator by doing the following:
-
Create a shortcut to
C:\Windows\System32\control.exe.
-
Right click the shortcut you made and click Properties, then click the Advanced button.
Check the box for Run As Administrator.
Opening the shortcut will run the application elevated:
You can also do this from the command line as QMechanic73 pointed out in his answer.
Solution 2:
Control.exe only launches an Explorer instance and the Explorer can't be run as admin by default. The Elevated-Unelevated Explorer Factory ignores the "Run as Admin" command.
In 2010 I discovered a way to disable the Elevated-Unelevated Explorer Factory
You need to remove/rename the value RunAs in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\AppID\{CDCBCFCA-3CDC-436f-A4E2-0E02075250C2}and now the Elevated-Unelevated Explorer Factory is disabled and selecting Run as admin for control.exe starts the Control Panel as admin.