Installing drivers without switching to administrator account

[CamTron]

Like many people, I use Windows with a non-administrator account, this tends to cause problems when I plug in new devices. Every time I plug in a new USB flash drive, mouse, camera, WiFi card, or anything that my computer hasn't seen before, I get this message:

You do not have sufficient security privileges to install devices on this computer. Please contact your site administrator, or logout and log in again as an administrator and try again.

Most of the time, I can just click OK, and ignore the message, and the device works perfectly fine without installing special drivers for it, but the only way to get rid of the annoying message is to log out, log in as Administrator, let it install the driver, log out, and log back in to my normal account. Is there a way I can allow my standard user to install devices, or even be able to type a password to allow the Hardware Wizard to run with Admin rights?

[blackwingcat]

Hi.

 

1. Create Shortcut cmd.exe

2. check property run as another user.

3. Input Administorators id and password

4. Run devmgmt.msc or mmc.exe

5. you can install driver.

[CamTron]

Thanks! Somehow, I didn't think of doing that. I just created a shortcut to devmgmt.msc on the Desktop and set it to "Run as different user". It's a lot to click through, and not seamless like XP, but at least it works.

[pointertovoid]

It does take some action, but I understand it as an security advantage.

 

Drivers use to run in kernel mode on a PC. They access the whole machine, for instance they can read and write a sector on a disk without passing by the file system and asking the OS the permission to handle a specific file. Or they can set the fan speed and voltages on your mobo, or reprogram the Bios - potentially destructive.

 

A user process can't do that, so the user session protects your data and hardware.

 

It's correct for an operating system to limit the paths from user-mode (generally linked with user sessions) to kernel-mode (used by the system and on some OS by the admin sessions). Win95-98-Me didn't, Nt4 and followers try to (see the many "elevation of privilege" in Microsoft's patch list).

 

For such an advantage, I gladly open an admin session (or shortcut) every time I connect a new hardware.