14 DAY TRIAL // The Elevation PowerToys that have been initially made available for Windows Vista can now also be integrated with the first Beta of Windows 7. Fighting a bug in Win 7 Beta, Michael Murgolo, a senior consultant with Microsoft Services - U.S. East Region, and the maker of the Elevation PowerToys for Windows Vista, has tweaked the tools, permitting users to integrate them with the current development milestone of the next iteration of Windows.
“The Elevate command in the Elevation PowerToys does not work correctly in the Windows 7 Beta. The application is launched elevated, but the arguments are not passed to the application. It turns out that this is caused by a known bug in the Windows 7 Beta. The ShellExecute method of the Shell Scripting Objects does not pass the argument parameter when it is stored in a variable,” Murgolo stated.
The issue was reported in December 2008, and this week Murgolo managed to come up with a solution designed to bypass the Windows 7 bug and allow the Elevation PowerToys to play nice with the operating system. Following the changes delivered by the developer, users should no longer have any issues when it comes down to the integration of the Elevation PowerToys into Windows 7 Beta.
“Luckily, I found that using the VBScript Execute statement allows me to pass the ShellExecute parameters as literal strings. I've attached an updated version of Elevate.vbs that has this workaround. Please give this a try, if you are using the Elevation PowerToys with Windows 7. Simply replace the version in the Elevation PowerToys download with this one , and reinstall the Elevate Command PowerToy using ElevateCommand.inf,” Murgolo added.
The Elevation PowerToys for Windows Vista have been created in order to make it easy for users faced with a high volume of elevation tasks to keep User Account Control enabled. In this sense, the PowerToys have been offering options such as: Run as Administrator for third-party scripting tools; Run as Another User; Prompt Here as System for CMD and Windows PowerShell and Drag-and-drop Elevation Gadget. With Windows 7, Microsoft has relaxed UAC, allowing users more control over the level of nagging produced by the feature. However, the Elevation PowerToys could always come in handy.
The Elevation PowerToys are available for download here.
Windows 7 Beta is available for download here.
Product keys to activate Windows 7 Beta are available here.