Today is the nineteenth day of Diduary. You can see links to all of the published articles in the series here.

I’m sure many of you have been frustrated by the age-old (OK, it’s not that old) problem of needing to run your application as an administrator in Vista or Windows 7. Commonly, that application MIGHT ask for elevated priveleges, but in some cases (old software), the application just fails. This is because it doesn’t know it needs to ask for those priveleges, and ends up erroring because it can’t access your file system, or registry, or something like that.

If you’ve started looking around, you may have discovered that you can right-click on the application’s icon (or shortcut), and there’s an item that reads:

Having this option available is great, because I can run any application “as administrator” whenever I think of it. That’s the problem I have with this solution, however. I have to remember EVERY TIME that I open this application that I need to right-click and choose “Run as Administrator” from the menu. Nearly every time I’ve needed to do this, I end up double-clicking the icon, starting the application, and THEN remembering that this is the one that needs elevated priveleges. Annoying.

If you dive a little deeper, however, you’ll find some amazing options for compatibility with your application. Right-click again, and choose Properties. From there, choose the “Compatibility” tab. Here’s what mine looks like:

You’ll find that there is a checkbox at the bottom for “Priveleges,” which makes it possible for you to mark that program to run as an administrator by default. This way, you don’t have to remember each time you launch your app.

There’s plenty of other compatibility options in there, but make sure you only choose the ones you need. No need to run in some crazy small resolution unless you really need it.