Martin Heller
Contributing Writer

Vista User Account Control, Redux: Script Elevation Power Toys

analysis
Jul 13, 20071 min

Randall Kennedy has learned from running Linux that UAC is probably a Good Thing: Enterprise Desktop | InfoWorld | Learning to Live with UAC | July 11, 2007 08:43 AM | By Randall Kennedy. I came to similar conclusions in March. At the time, I bewailed the lack of a Windows Vista equivalent to su or sudo. Randall mentions a solution to this in his antepenultimate paragraph: Michael Murgolo's Script Elevation

I came to similar conclusions in March. At the time, I bewailed the lack of a Windows Vista equivalent to su or sudo.

Randall mentions a solution to this in his antepenultimate paragraph: Michael Murgolo’s Script Elevation Power Toy, from Technet Magazine’s code archive. The article explaining the Script Elevation Power Toys is here.

There are a bunch of PowerToys there, not just one. You not only get the elevate command, you get right-click menu items to run various script types as Administrator, and right-click menu items to open normal and Administrator CMD and PowerShell prompts at folders from Explorer.

The only issue I have with Murgolo’s tools is the installation. In an effort to provide granularity, Murgolo made it so that you have to do 9 separate right-click/Install/approve actions to install all the PowerToys. A traditional MSI package that installed all 9 tools would be a welcome addition. It isn’t an either/or choice, after all.

Martin Heller

Martin Heller is a contributing writer at InfoWorld. Formerly a web and Windows programming consultant, he developed databases, software, and websites from his office in Andover, Massachusetts, from 1986 to 2010. From 2010 to August of 2012, Martin was vice president of technology and education at Alpha Software. From March 2013 to January 2014, he was chairman of Tubifi, maker of a cloud-based video editor, having previously served as CEO.

Martin is the author or co-author of nearly a dozen PC software packages and half a dozen Web applications. He is also the author of several books on Windows programming. As a consultant, Martin has worked with companies of all sizes to design, develop, improve, and/or debug Windows, web, and database applications, and has performed strategic business consulting for high-tech corporations ranging from tiny to Fortune 100 and from local to multinational.

Martin’s specialties include programming languages C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and SQL, and databases PostgreSQL, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle Database, Google Cloud Spanner, CockroachDB, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase. He writes about software development, data management, analytics, AI, and machine learning, contributing technology analyses, explainers, how-to articles, and hands-on reviews of software development tools, data platforms, AI models, machine learning libraries, and much more.

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