Windows 8 and especially Windows 10 are notorious for their strict rules of opening programs that may influence system settings. I need a lot of such programs to run immediately when Windows starts, such as Sleeper, Favorite Launcher and NumPad Transformer, so that this prompt to give permission for each of them became really annoying! Searching on line for a solution I found none! To disable UAC is not welcome, since it involves security risks, while putting each and every program that needs elevated rights to the Windows Task Scheduler is not convenient and it may not even work. Some applications keep giving UAC prompts even if they are started by the Scheduler!

I’m going to share with you an easy solution that I’ve found almost unexpectedly after making some experiments, fearing that even this won’t work, yet it finally did!, and it does work without problems for a long time! I am now able to run a lot of programs upon startup, each of them with Administrator rights, without having to face and answer a single prompt! Copy the paths of your programs and paste them in a plain text document (at the Notepad). Each path should be in a new line and each line has to start with this directive: start “”

Here follows an example for opening 2 programs. As you see, the paths that I used are those to the shortcuts that open these programs, shortcuts that give to each of them Administrator rights.

start "" "C:\Users\YourAccountName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\A Program"
start "" "C:\Users\YourAccountName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Another Program"

Save this text file in any folder you like with whatever name and with a “bat” extension, e.g. as AdministratorPrograms.bat As you may know, batch files is a standard method for Windows to automate some tasks. If you run this batch file you will have to give permission for each and every program that is included in the list. We don’t want that of course, it is precisely the problem we try to solve.

Copy the path of your batch file, wherever you might have saved it, and open the Windows Task Scheduler. Create a new task giving it (in the very first tab) highest privileges. Give it a name that you will be able to recognize (e.g. my startup programs), let it be triggered upon log on (second tab) with an Action (third tab) of running your batch file (paste in the Action box the path to your batch file).

Check also the remaining tabs in case you need to change anything there (the default options are good enough) and press OK to close the task editor. Letting the Windows Task Scheduler run a batch file that contains application shortcuts “armed” with Administrator rights works exactly like a Whitelist: everything opens without any questions and any problems at all.

Enjoy!, and don’t forget to share this post!