Quick tip: Running as Administrator without leaving the keyboard
8 January, 2011 § 3 Comments
Once in a while I have to edit my ‘hosts‘ file on my Windows machine. The ‘hosts‘ file allows a user to redirect network requests to different locations, for example if you wanted requests to google.com to go to bing.com instead.
On my machine the ‘hosts‘ file is located under “C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts“. Since this file is located under the Windows directory, write access to the file requires administrator privileges.
Simply running notepad.exe, open the file, make changes, and saving won’t work. The editor will have to be launched with administrative privileges.
There are a couple of ways that this can be done, and I want to show you one of the fastest ways to do this:
For those who don’t want to watch the video, the shortcut is to hit the Windows key (
), type ‘notepad‘, then press Ctrl+Shift+Enter. This will launch the program with administrative privileges without taking your hands off the keyboard.
Do you know any cool tips like this one? Please share them in the comments.
JAWS 
This is really useful. Keyboard shortcuts are where it’s at! Thanks!
Hey Hey Jared! Really cool tip; I didn’t know it.
I don’t know if I many cools tips like yours. I use Alt+F4 sometimes to close windows; and Ctrl+W in Firefox to close a tab. It isn’t anything cool like your tip; but it is handy. Keep up the cool tricks and other posts you are doing!
Oh yeah, these kind of shortcuts save a lot of time in aggregate. I also use Windows+R to quickly run programs that are found in the PATH like notepad and calc. If you really want to save time on tasks that you do often, you can use programs like Sikuli Script, AutoHotKey, and Selenium.