Saturday, April 11, 2009

Deadwood in Vista: The admin cmd prompt workaround

I posted yesterday about working around Vista's UAC with Deadwood by renaming the Deadwood program. Another way to get Deadwood to work in Vista is to use a cmd prompt with superuser (sorry, I meant to say "admin"; I've been using Linux for far too long) privileges.

To create a cmd prompt with admin rights:
  • Right click on an unused part of the desktop
  • Select the "new" sub-menu
  • Select "shortcut" in this sub-menu
  • When it asks for the location of the new shortcut, just type in "cmd" (without the quotes)
  • Click on "next"
  • When it asks for a name for the shortcut, the name "cmd" is fine; click on "finish"
  • There will now be a shortcut on your desktop with the name "cmd". Right click on this shortcut.
  • Select "properties", and make sure the tab selected at the top of the "proprties" window is the "shortcut" tab
  • Click on the "advanced" button
  • Check the "execute as administrator" checkbox
  • Click OK in this window and (if needed) in the "properties" window
At this point, you will have a shortcut with the name "cmd" that is akin to the "su" command in *NIX: Clicking on this shortcut will give you a command prompt with full access to the system. Note that the UAC thingy will ask for confirmation every time before giving you access to this command prompt.

Once setup, this cmd window can be used to install Deadwood on Windows Vista as per the directions for installing Deadwood in Windows XP.