Just a quick tip for you today, folks – a bit of troubleshooting for some of the more finicky programs and games you’ll be running on your computer. See, the way Windows 7 sets up its User Account Control, the majority of programs on your system aren’t configured to run with administrative privileges. Unfortunately, while this does shield you from malicious programs to some degree, it also means that some older applications and utilities – particularly those which haven’t been patched to support Windows 7′s new UAC features – won’t actually function properly without administrative privileges.

Thankfully, it’s actually very easy to set it up so that a program always runs as an administrator. The bad news, of course, is that you’ll need to do this on an application-by-application basis: you’re not going to be able to do this in batches.

Anyway, right click on the shortcut to the application (or the app itself) and click on the “Compatibility” tab. Down towards the bottom of this tab, there should be a small checkbox under “Privilege Level” that reads “Run This Program as an Administrator.” Check it, apply your changes, and exit out. Now, whenever you run the program, it’ll run with administrative privileges, and you’ll be prompted whether or not you want to allow the program to make changes to your system. Click on “yes,” and you’re golden.

As for how to get rid of that prompt, well…let’s just say that in order to do so, you’re have to pretty much disable Windows UAC…and you really don’t want to do that.

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