UI automation of mouse click at logon screen in windows 8.1 - user-interface

For UI automation testing purposes, I need to click a button on the windows 8.1 logon screen where it prompts to select a user account. And no, I do not need to select a user account. Its a button in particular. I am not quite sure how to do it. I tried to include my script as a Group Policy (gpedit.msc) startup script but its not working. But the same works when I include it as a Group Policy logon script.
I tried to directly include it in the registry as well under Group Policy startup scripts but it didn't work. Adding the script in the registry to be executed at logon works. My script is in Python.
Has anyone done anything like this by adding their script through gpedit.msc? (I might be doing something wrong at this step in that case). Other methods and ideas are good too. Any help is much appreciated. :)

Related

is there any option in windows registry that i can always run a program as admin without UAC and admin password

i am developing a desktop application.
how can i make it to always run as admin for non-admin user without UAC and admin password by making change in windows registry.
windows change registry option would be preferred but if there is any other option please tell.
any help will be appreciated
thanks
There is no such feature. The point of UAC is to ensure the user is aware that the program being started will have access to admin privileges. If there were a way to turn that off, then malware would do it.
The user can disable the UAC prompts via a control panel setting, but not for a particular program.
If your program always requires admin privileges to do what it needs to do, you should have an entry in its manifest. Modern versions of Visual Studio have options in the project settings for the executable for setting common items like this in the manifest automatically.

Windows 7 administrator and still need to "Run as administrator"

I'm having a mystery.
I have a Windows 7 PC, I am an administrator on it. But, I have a software tool that still requires me to run it with "Run as Administrator" to work properly. Why isn't it enough just to be the admin and just run it with double-click?
The thing gets complicated - I have another PC with a user that is an administrator also, and the tool runs there just with double-click properly.
What could be the difference between the PCs? In both of them, the user is an administrator!
Thanks for any help,
This is the impact of the User Account control (UAC), which assigned 2 tokens to admin accounts and runs the shell (explorer) and all started programs by default with the filtered token which represents standard user rights. To request admin rights, you have to right click and select “Run as administrator”.

Windows Server 2008 R2 scheduler ignores "hidden" setting

I have the following problem: I've created scheduled jobs that are only containing calls to a cmd and have parameters that contain things like project name etc.
I know about the fact that you have to set it to "Run only when user is logged on" if you want to see the window (cmd in this case) and also have to uncheck "hidden".
Until a week or two ago that worked fine, the box was showing up. Now the exact same job does no longer show the dos box. I suspect a windows update but I couldn't find anything useful in the update history of the server.
Do you guys have any idea what it might be? I tried switching the settings between the two "run as" options, tried setting it to hidden, tried switching "configure for" around...
The jobs run ok most of the time, the output is generated in most cases but if things go wrong I want to see the shell and not have to pipe everything to a .txt :/
I tried looking on google etc for a solution but only found other problems or the "my tasks run hidden if I choose run whether user is logged on or not" solutions.
Any ideas or hints? Anything would be really appreciated!
As you use scheduler to automate running of some rutine task, what's the point of manually checking/controlling it's execution? It is sort of negates benefit of automation and should be done through some basic logging (you can built in in your task scripts or whatever it is) and even viewer where you can check whether your tasks was run successfully.
Why it is required to you to see this window? Are you really need it?
If you state that it used to work OK then check logs does your tasks run successfully all the tine but hidden from you or it's something else?
Try to re-create / create new task & check whether it is not run hidden with settings you use.
From your description your scheduled task indeed configured so that it should be visible, namely:
- It is scheduled under your current logon account.
- It is configured to Run only when user is logged on.
These 2 conditions required for task to be visible.
The Hidden checkbox in the Windows Task Scheduler has nothing to do with how the scheduled program is displayed (in fact, there are no display options for scheduled tasks like there are with shortcuts). The Hidden checkbox controls whether or not the task is displayed in the Task Scheduler. If you set check it, then Task Scheduler will not display it unless the View Hidden Tasks option in the View menu is selected. You should still see the program window when it runs even if it is checked.
You did not indicate what changes you had made to the task between the time it worked and when it stopped, but one change that would prevent the window from being shown is if you had changed the account that runs it to the SYSTEM account. That is a trick that people use to hide the window (which is not a good solution, especially since there are much safer options), so if you had changed that, then you would not see it.
(The OP may have already fixed this by now), but if anyone else has the same problem, check the user account. If the task is not too complicated, you could do as Mikhail suggested and re-create the task from scratch.

How to implement custom UAC privilege UI?

When deleting a file in Windows Explorer (Windows 7), if admin privileges are required to delete the file, this dialog is displayed:
Is there a way to achieve this kind of effect in my app?
Currently I am launching a process 'as administrator' to perform the same sort of action (replacing a file rather than deleting it), so the user is shown the generic UAC dialog, asking:
"Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?"
Is the kind of helpful UI shown by Explorer (as opposed to the generic UAC dialog) possible in a 3rd party app?
I'm guessing no, since it would allow 3rd parties to elevate privileges in a sneaky way.
Use Button_SetElevationRequiredState to add the shield to the button. When the user pushes the button, use the COM elevation moniker to create the helper object.
The default setting on Windows 7 is for most system components to not show the UAC dialog.
If you change your setting to always prompt, you will see that clicking Continue in the Explorer dialog would create the normal UAC prompt.
As a non-system binary, your code would always prompt except at the most lenient UAC setting (never prompt.)

How can I programmatically configure Windows cmd.exe settings?

I have a lot of different servers that I connect to. Each time I connect to a new machine I go through the several mouse clicks to setup basic options for cmd.exe, such as QuickEdit mode and expanding the screen display and buffers. This article describes what I do pretty well (with my own settings, of course): http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/commandpromptoptions.mspx?mfr=true
This is annoying. I would like to run a quick configureCmd.cmd script upon login that will update all of these settings automatically such that when I open the cmd.exe it is already configured without any additional work on my part. Running the script on login is easy, but I do not know where these settings are stored. I figured the Registry, but my experiments do not show any difference in HKLM | HKCU \Software\Microsoft\Command Processor.
Console Windows are not part of the command processor, so it follows that their settings are separate. Take a look at
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console.

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