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I want to run a program (WhatPulse) when I login to my Win 8 account. The developers recommend to run it with admin privileges because that will "improve input accuracy". The problem running it as admin at startup/login usually requires a manual confirmation that this is OK. So I'm looking for a way to circumvent that.

In brief: the program (WhatPulse) should start automatically with elevated privileges when I login.

Disclaimer: I know that there are many very questions here but non of them quite solved my particular issue which is a combines several issues discussed in other questions (just for clarification):

  1. The program should automatically run with admin rights
  2. It should do so when the user logs in
  3. It should circumvent the UAC prompt that usually shows up when running a program as admin
  4. This is on Win 8.1
Christoph
  • 1,943

1 Answers1

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I finally got this to work by running the program as a scheduled task. Here is how (I will provide the settings I used, but you can obviously modify some of them without affecting the overall idea):

  1. Start "Task Scheduler" (Start -> type "Task Scheduler" -> click "Task Scheduler")
  2. Click "Create Task ..." (Under "Actions")
  3. On the "General" Tab: Give the task a name and select "Run with highest privileges" as well as "Configure for Windows 8.1".
  4. On the "Trigger" Tab: Click: "New..." and select "Begin the task At log on", and "Settings Specific User", then click OK
  5. On the "Actions" Tab: Click: "New..." and then click "Browse...". Navigate to the program file that you want to run and click "Open". Then click OK.
  6. On the "Settings" Tab: deactivate/unselect "Stop the task if it runs longer than" as well as "If running task does not end when requested, force it to stop" (Not sure if this is necessary, but that's what I did)
  7. Click OK and you're done

To verify that everything is working as intended, log out and log back in (or restart the computer). You should not get any UAC prompt.

If you are a skeptic like myself, you probably also want to check whether the program is really running with admin privileges. To do that,

  1. Open the Task Manager (Ctrl + Shift + Esc)
  2. Navigate to the Details tab
  3. If you don't see a column entitled "Elevated" there, right click on a column header and select "Select columns". Tick "Elevated" (near the bottom of the list) and click OK
  4. Find your program in the list of processes. If it has a "yes" in the "elevated" column, it is running with admin privileges.
Christoph
  • 1,943