However, there are also many drawbacks. Especially in what security it means. Separating permissions is a basic Windows protection measure. A malicious program, without Administrator permissions, is practically useless. However, if we give it these permissions, it can have full control over the PC.
For example, an antivirus must always be run with these permissions in order to be able to analyze the system and take the necessary actions. But other programs, or a game, no. We should never give this level of privileges to anything downloaded from the Internet that is not fully trusted, since we will be endangering the security of our Windows.
Check if you have Administrator permissions
Although it may not be the most used, we are going to see how to know the system accounts that have administrator permissions on the computer through the command line. To do this, the first thing we have to do is open a command prompt window and then execute the following command
net localgroup administrators
As soon as you press Enter, we will see how a list appears with the accounts that have administrator permissions. If ours is on the list, then we will have those privileges.
From the control panel we can also know if we go to the user accounts section within the control panel and from there we access the option manage accounts. There we can find all the system accounts where we can check if our account has special privileges. To do this, the word Administrator must appear just below the account.
And if we are Windows 10 or Windows 11 users, we can also check it from the configuration page that we can access from the menu Home > Settings. Once there, we choose the option accounts and then we select the menu option Your information. On the right side we can see how our name appears, email account and if we have special privileges, the word Administrator will appear just below.
With any of these options we will be able to check if our Windows account has administrator permissions or not and thus be able to access certain system settings or be able to run certain tools with the highest privileges. If we do not have permissions, we will have to contact the administrator of the team to request that they grant us these administrator permissions.
Run as Administrator in Windows
We can carry out this configuration in several different ways if we use the latest version of the Microsoft operating system. Hence, we are going to show you these methods to run all types of applications in Windows with administrator permissions directly and easily.
With the context menu
As in Windows 7, it is possible open any file in Windows 10 by right-clicking on it. By doing so, we can see the corresponding button that will allow us to run the program in question with this level of privileges.
In addition, we will also be able to choose if we want to open the program with another user instead of ours. We can also do this in a similar way to how it is done in Windows 7, with the difference that, instead of having to hold down the Control and Shift keys, it only works with Shift.
Perhaps this is the fastest method in most cases to carry out this task that we are discussing and access all the functions and tools available in that application.
From the search engine
One of the features of Windows 10 is its search engine. From it we can find all kinds of files and programs that we have installed on the PC in seconds. If we use this search engine to run programsopening them with Administrator permissions is very simple.
We can do this in two different ways. The first one is from the program file, since we will have an option specially created for this purpose. And the second one is by right-clicking on the program in question and choosing this option.
From the Start menu
We can also do this on any program that is pinned to the start menu. To do this, what we must do is locate the program in the list of software installed on the computer and right-click on it. We will be able to see an option that will allow us to run the program in question with this level of privileges.
The effect will be the same as with any of the previous methods. Of course, we must bear in mind that not all programs can be executed with these permissions. For example, Microsoft’s own programs that come installed with Windows 10 do not need it, therefore, we will not have this option. Nor can we open as admin the programs that we have downloaded from the Microsoft Store, since the design of the UWP is not intended to go beyond its own configuration.
From File Explorer
Another of the options that we have in Windows to run an application as Administrator is to use Windows Explorer. The process, how could it be otherwise, is very simple. We open Explorer and select the file we want to run as Administrator. We go to the top and click on the Manage tab and in the Application Tools group we have the Run as administrator option available.
Always open as Administrator
The above methods are very useful when we only want a program to open with these permissions once. But if we always want to do it, carrying out the process manually all the time is quite tedious. Fortunately, Microsoft allows us to change this mode of operation directly from the file’s properties so that we can tell the program to always open as administrator.
To do this, we must take the executable of the program, or the shortcut, and right-click on it to open the properties window. Now, the rest of the process can be done in two different ways.
If what we want is for this configuration to apply only to the shortcut, we can select the shortcut tab, click on the “Advanced Options«, and check the box that we indicate in the window that will appear.
But if we want this change to be applied directly to the executable of the program, so that it always opens with these permissions, we run it from wherever we do it, then we must go to the compatibility tab, to check the option to run as administrator from it.
After applying the changes, when we open the program it will do so with the maximum level of privileges. Of course, we remind you that we should only give this level of privileges to programs that are fully trusted. Otherwise we will be endangering the security of our PC, something increasingly important these days.
But later in time perhaps, and more than anything for security reasons, we want to revert the changes and not execute that program specifically always with administrator permissions. Today, therefore, to undo the established changes, we only have to carry out the steps described above again, unchecking the box that we activated before to always execute as administrator.
Trick: use SUDO as in Linux
Linux has its own command with which we will be able to execute any program or command with superuser permissions: SUDO. It is enough to invoke this command in a console, enter the corresponding password, and we will be able to make use of these permissions in it.
On Windows, obviously, this command does not exist. But, if we are used to using Linux, we can recover this command with a very simple open source tool that we can download .
So that sudo can be executed as one more command from MS-DOS we must copy the executable to a known path and add this to the system environment variables. A much easier and faster alternative to make it work is to copy sudo.exe directly to C:/Windows.
Once copied, we can already make it work. We open an MS-DOS window and type in it:
sudo cmd
A new MS-DOS window will open automatically, but this time we will see how the new one comes from administrator permissions.
We can change the cmd command to any other application that we want to open, for example, notepad.exe. And this will open directly as administrator.
In the event that we want to change the name of the command to any other (for example, superuser) we simply have to locate the file C:/Windows/sudo.exe, which we have copied before, and change the name to “superuser.exe”, or the command we want.
Open as Administrator in old versions of Windows
For open a program as Administrator in Windows 7, All we have to do is place the mouse on it, and clicking the right mouse button, choose the option «Execute as an administrator«.
If our account has Administrator permissions, we can open the program directly with this level of privileges. If not, we will have to enter the credentials of an account that has these permissions to be able to do it.
If we hold down the Ctrl+Shift keys when we right-click we can see another option called “Run as another user”. This will allow us to open the program directly with the permissions of another user account on the computer.
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