Guilt - A powerful motivator...

My recent post on running as admin, and my admission that I was still doing it motivated me to reduce my shame quotient by removing my day-to-day account from the Administrators group once and for all.

Given that I've been running as a non-admin when developing samples for a good while now, it's about time I did this day-to-day as well. Fortunately, I was running under a separately named account (i.e. not running as Administrator), so making the switch was relatively simple and (so far) painless.

My friend and .NET Mobile guru, Anil John, has some more to say about this at:

http://www.learnmobile.net/weblog/secureCoding/RunningasLocalAdmin-JustS.html

One of the few things that you need to adjust to in running as a non-admin is using the Run As... command to run program install routines, etc., that require admin privileges. It's as simple as right-clicking the desired executable, and selecting Run As..., and then filling in the required credentials.

One gripe I have is that you can't run Windows Explorer this way (or at least, I haven't figured out how to yet...if anyone knows, let me know, and I'll post the solution), so if I need to change ACLs on something, I occasionally have to switch to log in as the admin account to make the change. A minor thing, but I hope I can find an easier way to deal with that.

2 Comments

  • Well, that certainly works, but it's a little extreme, since it does some wacky stuff with your desktop and tooltray icons.





    Given that XP allows fast user switching, I think I'll just stick with switching to the admin login temporarily to make the necessary ACL changes.

  • I came across the "Developer Lifestyle" article (see the link Anil posted above) last week.. I have changed over on my home machine, and I will be making the plunge at work this week. So far, it has been enlightening.





    I'm glad to see more people going this way. =)





    -Nino

Comments have been disabled for this content.