"sudo" for Windows Vista

If you’ve ever administered a UN*X box before, you’ll know that you should never log in as root, but rather log in as a normal unprivileged user and use sudo or su to perform administrative tasks. That has always been best practice for Windows boxes too, but usually never followed, until it was forced upon us (you can turn it off though) with User Account Control, or UAC. Even if you are an Administrator account, your account runs in an unprivileged mode until it needs to become an Administrator, and then you are prompted to confirm this.

I sometimes find that I need to run ipconfig /flushdns, especially seeing that I have been playing around with a local DNS server this week. In Windows Vista, that command needs to be run by a privileged user. But if I am in a command prompt, I can’t change to a privileged user. I have to open another command prompt, usually by right clicking on it after searching for cmd in the start menu, and choosing “Run as Administrator”.

Until now… This utility, by Michael Murgolo published in TechNet Magazine, is the equivalent of the sudo command, for Windows. There are a few other related tools in the download, but the “elevate” tool is the one that I need.