I have a user in one of our locations that we installed Defraggler for. However, he is unable to run it himself, because he is not an admin on his workstation.
I wanted to know if there is a way to either force Defraggler to RunAs Admin every time, or create a shortcut that will run it as Admin, so that he can run the application without one of us from the IT dept. going to his location to run it for him.
I look forward to your reply.
You cannot run an application with admin credentials without the use of the local Administrator password if that was possible all hell would break loose.
So you don't have many options which I can see being:
- provide the user with the local admin password and trust he won't abuse the system.
- create a limited user account with special permissions that would allow Defraggler to run correctly
- at the request of the user the IT department could launch Defraggler remotely with administrator credentials using Sysinternals PsExec the only thing is some applications may not appear on the desktop if executed in this manner so it's unclear if this would work.
The other thing to consider when running applications with admin credentials if it was used to launch another process (via file open/save dialog box) this would inherit the parent status and thus run with admin status too, unfortunately Defraggler has the potential to be exploited this way.
If your user has a specific file or folder he would like to defrag then perhaps using PsExec with Sysinternals Contig console defrag tool would be more appropriate.
Richard S.