A few tips worth noting for Vista Command prompt users especially elevating the command console with administrator privileges:
Right-click on any folder on your Windows Vista machine while holding down the
shift key.
You'll see an extra context-sensitive menu item there:
Open Command Prompt here.
Just click on this menu and a command window will open with the current working directory set to the folder's actual location.
In the past there was a Windows XP powertoy that did this; now it's built into the operating system (albeit hidden away to protect the unwary from themselves).
What's really cool about this is that if the target folder is a network location, Windows Vista silently maps a network drive to that location before opening the folder (so that your command prompt has a valid path containing a drive letter) and then deletes the network drive once the command prompt is closed.
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User Account Control is an important part of the security protection that Windows Vista offers.
For any user with administrative credentials, you can always execute a process with full admin rights by right-clicking on the executable or shortcut and choosing "Run as Administrator".
I regularly want to open an admin-level command prompt, and it's a distraction to have to move my hands off the keyboard to go through the elevation contortions.
So I was delighted to find a little keyboard shortcut for launching an elevated process.
Simply press Ctrl+Shift+Enter from the search bar on the start menu with a selected application, and that triggers elevation.
For example, to launch an elevated command prompt, simply press the Win key; type cmd; press Ctrl+Shift+Enter; and then hit Alt+C to confirm the elevation prompt.
Six keystrokes to an elevated command prompt!
Once I've got an elevated command prompt, I always like to execute color 4f as my first input so that this console window is visually differentiated from other non-elevated windows.
Windows Vista Secrets and more can be found here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/default.aspxYou may have to Search the Archives to find them all.