Letters@windowsitpro.com

Vista UAC Workaround
Michael Otey mentions the annoyance of frequent User Accounts Control (UAC) prompting in his Top 10 column (“Windows Vista Annoyances,” January 2008, InstantDoc ID 97490). I share his pain. However, I’ve found an interesting fix for the UAC problem.

The reason for all the prompting is that the application in question is being started by the desktop shell (explorer.exe). Winlogon.exe starts explorer.exe as a nonadministrative process. If you can get explorer.exe to run as an administrative process, any application that it starts won’t get the UAC prompt. One solution is to create a file named ElevateExplorer.cmd with the following two lines:

 taskkill /F /IM explorer.exe
  start C:\Windows\explorer.exe

Then, create a shortcut icon on your desktop to execute ElevateExplorer.cmd, and set its properties to make it run in the context of an administrator. Now, each time you log on, double-click the ElevateExplorer icon. Of course, the invocation of ElevateExplorer.cmd will cause a UAC prompt. However, once ElevateExplorer. cmd is finished running, it will have killed the copy of explorer. exe that was running as a nonadministrator and will have started a new explorer.exe instance, which will now be running as an administrator.

Using this method, all the applications that you start from either the desktop, Start menu, or task bar will run as an administrator—with no UAC prompt. This state stays in effect until you log off. If you want to revert back to the normal mode, just log off and log on again. —Ron Wright

PowerShell’s Virtues
I read Robert Sheldon’s “Power- Shell 101, Lesson 1” (February 2008, InstantDoc ID 97742), and I think it’s great that Windows IT Pro is bringing the virtues of Microsoft’s PowerShell to light. I’m an Oracle DBA who just finished migrating to Windows. In my former UNIX environment, I used scripting heavily because it was both a time saver and a necessity when scheduling tasks via CRON. I do rely on GUI tools to some extent, but I still prefer the speed and simplicity of scripts. PowerShell is now a key part of my migration methodology. The ease of scripting at an object level along with the plethora of cmdlets gave me the opportunity to develop and implement new tools for my environment that are far more powerful and flexible than anything I had with UNIX. Combining PowerShell with Oracle’s command-line tools has let me create SQL and RMAN scripts on-the-fly to perform reporting, maintenance, service monitoring, and backup tasks quickly and easily. Drop your batch scripts, and move to PowerShell. It truly rocks! —Stephen Morgan

We appreciate your feedback, Stephen. Stay tuned as Robert Sheldon continues his series of six PowerShell 101 articles. You can tackle Lesson 3 in this issue, page 39. And Robert has already begun writing a Power- Shell 201 series! —Amy Eisenberg

Too Much Server 2008 and Vista
I love your magazine, but lately it seems you’re covering only Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista. These are cool products, but how much of your reader base actually plans to install/use them in the next few months? Shouldn’t you dedicate some pages to existing software such as Windows Server 2003 and Exchange Server? I need articles that can help me with my current environment. —Robert Singer

Thank you for writing. You’ve touched on one of the most difficult parts of our job as editors. In every issue, we try to balance coverage of new technology with solutions you can implement today. At the same time, we want to include both novice and advanced topics and topics that are appropriate to small, medium, and large IT environments. Incidentally, when we surveyed our readers in September 2007, 14 percent of survey respondents had installed the Server 2008 beta at their workplace. Nearly 40 percent of survey respondents noted that they planned to migrate to the new server OS within a year of its release. That said, feedback from readers like you is crucial to us meeting your needs. Please write to me at letters@windows itpro.com and tell me what you’d like to see! If you prefer to make your comments online, we do review the feedback we receive on every article. —Amy Eisenberg