Restoring RunAs

Many of you have probably noticed that the “run as” feature in Server 2008 is less flexible than the similar feature in Server 2003. Whereas in the earlier operating system, you could run a program “as” any user whose credentials you could specify, Server 2008 only gives you one choice: run as Administrator.

Perhaps Microsoft’s designers thought that this would be adequate for 90% of the times that you need the secondary logon service (the service that provides “Run As”). And that may be true. But what about the other 10% of the time, for example, when you have a program that requires specific user credentials in order to run correctly?

I always shake my head when a new version of an OS takes away options that were available before. Why make life harder with software that is supposed to be an upgrade? Sure, you can use the command-line RunAs tool with the /user parameter, but that is way less convenient than the context menu.

Happily, what Microsoft taketh away, the System Internals people giveth, at least in this case. Google “ShellRunAs”, download it, and install it by running it with the /reg parameter. Now you’ll see “Run as different user” on your context menu. “Run as Administrator” is still there, so you get the best of both worlds.

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