We saw from the last post on how we can switch between two profiles completely. Well, the idea is same here as well, but here, we see how one can open or access one or more applications/programs and folders/files in another user profile, without logging off from the current profile.

We have seen ‘Run As’ option in application shortcuts which lets you open it with a different user profile. (for those don’t know that yet, simply right-click the shortcut of a program and click on ‘Run As’. It will ask you for the user credentials, provide them and you are free to use it.) These Run As shortcuts are easier for administrators when they require to install a program which requires admin credentials to get installed, from a power user machine. But, not everything provides that liberty to access them like that. For example, you want to access a share folder which you don’t have access, but your colleague has. So normally what you can do, is to ask your colleague to give his/her machine for some time, so that you can work on it, or ask them to send the files to you, or ask them to share the files in a common share folder which you can access. All these, as you can see, are time consuming and irritating. So lets get to the point — The RunAs command.

How to use the RunAs command ?

The command can be executed from Start — Run.

Syntax goes like this :  RUNAS [/profile] [/env] [/netonly] /user:user Program (Italics portion to be replaced by the user’s entry)

eg : Runas /profile /user:DEC\John explorer.exe, where John is the user name and DEC is his domain. Once this command is run, a command prompt window will prompt for the password of the user(here, John). Enter the password and press Enter.

A new explorer window will open up with John’s credentials. Enter the share folder path and it will be authenticated with John’s credentials.

Similarly, try for iexplore.exe and cmd instead of explorer.exe.