As we slowly start to roll out a couple of Vista RTM deployments to some of our developers it transpires there's a couple of little niggles that not many people have taken note of:
1. Last night Keni tried to install Visual Studio, but it kept failing saying it can't copy a certain file. Even though he's local adminstrator on a domain connected laptop, the problem turned out be that he didn't have the permission to install - or in this case copy the installer files to the correct location. He was so ready to blame our corrupt ISO image! In order to kick off the installation, right-click the executable and select the Run As Administrator option. This brings us to our next point;
2. The local administrator account is disabled by default. This means that even if you right-click and do the whole run as thing, you'll keep on being prompted to enter the username and password. So, into computer management you go, FIRST reset the password to something secure, and enable the account. Now you can proceed with your install!
You'll find this permission thing always popping up. In the next instances though, you'll simply be prompted to allow it to run with elevated permissions. e.g.:
- when you try to copy a file to the root of the C: drive
- try to launch mmc.exe from the RUN window
- manually install an updated driver for some hardware
Another handy tip from James is that when you have to install an application that has multiple files to executed, or simply don't have the RUN AS option, e.g. MSI packages, simply start up CMD.EXE using the RUN AS and launch all your installs from the resulting command prompt. All commands run from within this command prompt will launch with elevated permissions.
- Marlon