Quick tip: Running as Administrator without leaving the keyboard

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.

BumpTop 3D Desktop review

Today I installed the new 3D desktop software called BumpTop. I was lucky enough to recieve one of the free copies that ReadWriteWeb gave out of BumpTop and promptly installed it when I got the chance. I’ve been playing around with it today and made a short (6 minute) video of me using it. The software crashed at the end of the video 😦

Renaming multiple files in Microsoft Vista

A couple times a year you may actually want to rename multiple files all at the same time. I ran in to this today when I was given a .chm and a .h file from another coworker. The coworker had put spaces in the filename and I had to remove the spaces before I could work on them, like so:

Product Name Help.chm —> ProductNameHelp.chm
Product Name Help.h —> ProductNameHelp.h

In the process of renaming, I noticed a bug feature that lets you rename multiple files really fast and easy within Explorer. I’ve made a short video explaining how to do this: