Thread: Add "Run as Administrator" to Any File Type in Windows Vista

Have you ever tried to extract a file in the Program Files directory in Vista? You get all kinds license denied errors, and would normally fail. So how can we open up the zipfile as an administrator? How, you open a file as administrator?

There is a simple registry squeeze that will let us identify the action to run as administrator for a file type. Unfortunately you will have to create the tweak manually, but we will walk you through it.

Manual Registry Tweak

Start>>Search or run box>>type regedit>> browse down to the following key

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.zip



Now you want to get note of the Data value for the “(Default)” item. This tells you which application is registered to hold this file type, and also where we require going in the registry next.

E.g. since the data field in this example says “WinRAR.ZIP” we will require to browse down to the following registry key.

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WinRAR.ZIP\shell\open\command

What we want to perform is copy the shell\open\command section to shell\runas\command. The simplest technique to do that is right-click on “command” and then chooses Export.



Now open up the exported registry file in Notepad and change “open” to “runas” where specify below:



Double-click on the file to enter the information into the registry. Now you willl observe that the “runas” section is like to the “open” section:



And now you can right-click on a file and open it as administrator:



This example used WinRAR, but this must work for almost any filetype or application. You will just have to change where you look in the registry.