Run Explorer (shell) as an admin while logged in as a user.

This is a little odd one, if really only i hack you will use once a year, but its good to know its possible.

Lets say you have all users PC users not as local admins, and one of them fills out a huge survey online, but when they get to the end (30 minutes later) they realize they cannot save, they can only print. so they print it right? that would be a simple solution if they had any printers installed!

So how can i non admin add printers? that can't. and the user didn't want to redo the survey (national mangers, pfft all the same). So i had to come up with this hack below

Step one, open a new cmd via runas:

Runas /noprofile /user:localmachine\username cmd.exe

Step two, kill explorer.

Press ctrl+alt+esc and kill explorer.exe

Step three, open explorer.exe again as admin.

Go to that admin cmd window, and type”explorer”

Done..it will not close any other windows. Go to the task manager again, and you can see what running as what.

This is where you can add printers, or do anything else as and admin

Going back

Step four, kill explorer.

You cannot do this from the taskmanager, you (as a user) do know have rights to kill processes created by admins.

So go to your cmd window (running a admin) and type

Taskkill /im “explorer.exe”

Step five, start explorer again

In taskmamanger, go to file, new task, and type “explorer”. And it will all be back to normal.

Then end result is that have all their programs open still, but now a few extra printers too.

All this can be scripted (with a pause in the middle). so you can run it, pause, do your work as admin, press any key, and resume as the user....

so maybe you can use it more than once, because once scripted, it sure beats a log off and log on.