An Easier Way to Run Elevated: Running Programs as Administrator in Windows

Since Windows Vista, the programs you launch do not automatically get the run of your PC. Even when you are signed in with an administrator account, most apps start with ordinary, standard-user rights. When a task genuinely needs administrative power — installing software, editing protected system settings, writing to folders Windows guards — you have to elevate: deliberately run that one program as an administrator. This guide walks through every practical way to do it, from the one-click right-click command to a fast keyboard shortcut, and explains why Windows makes you ask in the first place.

The mechanism behind all of this is User Account Control (UAC), which Vista introduced and which Windows 7, 10 and 11 all still use in the same way. Learn it once and the same handful of moves works across every modern version of Windows.

Why you have to run elevated at all

Before Vista, day-to-day Windows accounts typically ran with full administrator rights all the time. That was convenient and dangerous in equal measure: any program you started — including anything that slipped in without your knowledge — inherited those same rights and could change the entire system. UAC replaced that with a least-privilege model. The idea is simple: give each program only the rights it needs to do its job, and no more.

Under UAC, even an administrator normally receives a filtered access token — effectively standard-user rights — for the programs they launch. When a program needs to do something administrative, Windows asks you to approve a one-time elevation to the full administrator token. That approval is the UAC prompt you have seen: a dialog that dims the desktop and asks whether you want to allow the program to make changes. If you are signed in as a standard user, the same prompt instead asks for an administrator's password. Either way, elevation is a conscious, per-launch decision rather than a permanent state — which is exactly the point.

Method 1 — Right-click and choose "Run as administrator"

This is the everyday way most people run elevated, and it works from just about anywhere a program icon appears.

1. Find the program you want — on the Start menu, on the desktop, on the taskbar, or as an .exe in File Explorer.
2. Right-click it. (On the modern Windows 11 taskbar you may need to right-click the app, then right-click its name again to reach the full menu.)
3. Choose Run as administrator.
4. Approve the User Account Control prompt — click Yes, or enter an administrator password if you are asked for one.

The program now starts with full administrator rights for this session. Close it and launch it normally next time and it goes back to standard rights — nothing is changed permanently.

Method 2 — The keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+Enter

This is the "easier way" the original Windows Now post shared, and it is still one of the fastest tricks in Windows. Instead of hunting for a right-click menu, you elevate straight from the keyboard as you launch. Here is the original tip, preserved faithfully:

1. Click the Start button.
2. In the search box, type the name of the application you wish to run elevated — for example cmd.exe, Notepad, or Windows Mail.
3. Hold Ctrl+Shift on your keyboard and then press Enter.

You will then receive a User Account Control prompt asking whether you want to run the application. Approve it and the app opens elevated. The beauty of this shortcut is that your hands never leave the keyboard: press the Windows key, type a few letters of the program's name, then Ctrl+Shift+Enter to launch the highlighted result as an administrator. On Vista the search box sat at the bottom of the Start menu; on Windows 10 and 11 you simply press the Windows key and start typing. The keystroke is the same everywhere.

The same Ctrl+Shift combination also elevates when you open an existing shortcut: hold both keys while you double-click (or press Enter on) a pinned or desktop shortcut and Windows treats it as a request to run elevated, prompting you through UAC in the usual way.

Method 3 — Set a shortcut to always run elevated (Advanced)

If there is one program you always run as administrator, you can bake elevation into its shortcut so you do not have to remember each time. You still get the UAC prompt at launch — this just saves you the extra click of choosing the command.

1. Right-click the program's shortcut and choose Properties.
2. On the Shortcut tab, click the Advanced button.
3. Tick Run as administrator, then click OK.
4. Click OK again to close Properties.

From now on, launching that shortcut requests elevation automatically. Note that this setting lives on the shortcut, so a different shortcut (or the raw .exe) to the same program will not be affected. Use this sparingly — reserve it for tools that are useless without administrative rights, not for everyday apps.

Method 4 — The Compatibility tab

There is a second place to make a program always request elevation, aimed at older software that was written before UAC existed and misbehaves without administrator rights.

1. Right-click the program's .exe (or its shortcut) and choose Properties.
2. Open the Compatibility tab.
3. Under the settings section, tick Run this program as an administrator.
4. Click OK.

If the checkbox is greyed out, the setting may be enforced for all users (look for a Change settings for all users button on the same tab), or the program may be one Windows will not let you elevate this way. The Compatibility tab is the right home for this when a legacy application only runs correctly with administrator rights; for everything else, prefer elevating on demand with Methods 1 or 2.

Opening an elevated Command Prompt

A great deal of Windows troubleshooting lives at the command line, and many commands fail — often silently or with an "access denied" message — unless the Command Prompt itself is elevated. An elevated Command Prompt runs as administrator, so every command you type inside it inherits those rights. There are three easy ways to open one:

• Keyboard: press the Windows key, type cmd, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter and approve the UAC prompt.
• Right-click: find Command Prompt in the Start menu, right-click it, and choose Run as administrator.
• From File Explorer: right-click the cmd.exe file and choose Run as administrator.

You can tell an elevated Command Prompt apart from an ordinary one because Windows prefixes its title bar with Administrator: — so the window reads Administrator: Command Prompt. Windows has marked elevated Command Prompt windows this way ever since Vista introduced the behaviour. The same approaches open an elevated Windows PowerShell or Windows Terminal window on newer systems — the elevation step is identical; only the app you type differs.

Which method should you use?

For a one-off task, reach for the right-click Run as administrator command (Method 1) or the Ctrl+Shift+Enter shortcut (Method 2) — both elevate a single launch and leave nothing behind. For a program you elevate constantly, set it on the shortcut's Advanced options (Method 3). For legacy software that refuses to run correctly without administrator rights, use the Compatibility tab (Method 4). In all four cases the UAC prompt still appears at launch — that confirmation is a feature, not a nuisance.

Elevation in Windows 10 and 11: the same idea, refined

If you learned these moves on Windows Vista, you already know how to run elevated on every version since. UAC works the same way in Windows 7, 8.1, 10 and 11: standard rights by default, a one-time prompt to elevate when a task needs administrative power. The prompt has been refined over the years and its default sensitivity has been tuned, and you can adjust how often it appears through User Account Control Settings in Control Panel — though the safest choice is to leave it at, or near, its default level, the second notch from the top, Notify me only when apps try to make changes to my computer. Windows 11 also tucks Run as administrator into its streamlined right-click menu and offers elevation directly from Start search, but underneath it is the very same elevation you have been using all along.

The takeaway has not changed since Vista: run as a standard user for everyday work, elevate deliberately when a specific task calls for it, and treat every UAC prompt as a checkpoint worth reading before you click Yes.