Task Scheduler in Windows is perhaps one of the most under utilized tools that I have known so far.Knowing it can make using Windows more fun and of course more interesting.
Windows Vista and it’s UAC prevents applications from running without admin privileges.
Although UAC can be disabled,many times it is not feasible for running just a single application that needs admin access.
Task scheduler comes to the rescue.What we will do is make a scheduled task that launches the application we desire with administrator rights,make the task accessible by creating a shortcut and finally using the application without UAC reminding us of entering administrator rights ever again for that application.
I will use Ccleaner here for illustration.
It is quite simple,let’s take a look how :
Launch Windows Task Scheduler ( Start > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Task Scheduler)
Make a new task by clicking on create task – this will be in this case launching CCleaner with administrative privileges.In General tab,check mark the option “Run with highest privileges”.
We will name this task as Launch_ccleaner.
In Actions tab,we will need to specify the executable of the application we are trying to run,in this case it’s ccleaner.exe
Let’s check if the task created shows up in task scheduler.
Till here,what we have done is made a task and associated it with the application to be run.
Now comes the shortcut for the created task.We need to create a shortcut to the above mentioned task on desktop from where we can run it.
The basic usage of running a task is :
schtasks /run /tn “taskname”
Here we will type :
schtasks /run /tn “Launch_ccleaner”
The shortcut is now created which on double clicking will always run CCleaner in administrator mode.No UAC popups will be seen while doing this as the task itself is run with admin rights irrespective of user logged on.
Isn’t task scheduler fun from Windows security perspective ?
Peace.