How do I use RUNAS with the Administrator account disabled in Windows 7

Question

My user account is an administrator account (well in the Administrator group technically). As I understand this I am always running in the standard user context except when elevation is required, which a UAC dialog allos/disallows.

My actual Administrator account on this machine is disabled and I would like to keep it disabled for security reasons.

The question then is how do I use RUNAS to launch a process with elevated privileges? It seems like the only argument used for elevation is the actual user name. How can I spawn a process within a command line with elevated privileges then if I don't have an Administrator account username to supply to RUNAS.

Maybe this isn't possible. If that is the case, that's fine, but what I'm not interested in is:

• Running cmd.exe as an administrator (neither through shift-click, right click option, or permanent flagging)
• A third party program like sudo or elevate.
• Creating another user account that is an explicit Administrator or renaming the Administrator account.

Answer 1

Your account can do anything the base Administrator account can do. That's what being a member of the Administrators group means. You just have to elevate your own account for a specific action before it will use those powers. When you see a prompt (perhaps on the context menu) that says "Run as Administrator", it's still using your account to do whatever task you run.