Run a program without administrative privileges in Windows 7

Question

My account in Windows 7 is an administrator account. When I open the Run box (WinKey + R), I am warned, "This task will be created with administrative privileges."

Is there any way to run programs as myself, but without administrative privileges when logged in as an administrator?

Answer 1

Yes.

Turn UAC back on!

Technically, the program will still run under the context of your account, but UAC will prevent system wide changes without authentication first.

The only other option is to create shortcuts and then right click, and choose Run as different user then choose an account which does not have administration rights.

Answer 2

You need to turn on User Account Control:

1. Go to Control Panel ⇨ User Accounts and Family Safety ⇨ User Accounts
2. Click on Change User Account Control settings
3. Select the Default level
4. click [OK]
5. Reboot

Answer 3

runas /trustlevel:0x20000 cmd.exe will e.g. launch a command prompt that believes it's an admin (if originally launched as such) but does not have elevated privileges like writing to C:\Windows\. This even works for installing e.g. msi packages that only require elevated privileges since by default they want to install to C:\Program Files (plus minus (x86)). Source: this SU answer

Answer 4

While one could argue you're doing things somewhat backwards, if you insist, you could look at:

DropMyRights

Process Explorer/Psexec