Microsoft wants you to run with lower privileges. They went out of their way in Windows Vista. You are a member of the Administrative group in Vista, but you the group is for deny only in your token. When you elevate, you get a new token without that deny group. Just like an administrator removing its newbie mask.
But I don’t run Vista like that: I run it the hard way. I am a regular user, and in the rare cases I need it, I switch over to another account that has administrative privileges. I disabled user account control (UAC) alltogether.
If you’re like me, try this 2 step trick to render you Vista slow or completely DOS (denial of service) depending on CPU and memory.
Save you work before you try this, you might have to reboot…
Bring up the task manager with CTRL-SHIFT-ESC. Click the “Resource Monitor”. Watch your screen flicker as your CPU goes up and your battery goes down…
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I have replicated this behavior on our Vista Business 32 computer. If a standard user tries to run the resource monitor from the task manager, the following happens. The task manager constantly flickers and it’s hard to click on anything. The computer reports 100% cpu useage from explorer.exe. Resoure monitor only shows up in the task bar as a round icon, but no “bar” to click on. This icon will move around the task bar randomly, displacing other items in the task bar. You cannot end task on it as task manager is messed up. Rebooting does fix the issue, but doesn’t make resource monitor work. No problems with an admin account. The effect looks like someone is alt-tabbing over and over again, 5 times a second. The flicker effect transfers to every window you open so the alt-tab theory seems corrent. You have about 20 miliseconds to click on something in the window before you lose window focus. It might take about 20 clicks to successfully click on anything in the window.
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Update. I managed to get services.msc started by using the run command in task manager. I then opened a dialog box for one of the services. Then I pressed the power button on the PC which started the shutdown process. The black shutdown (end task) windows shows up then and says you have dialog boxes open. You should close dialog boxes before shutting down. I then clicked “cancel” to stop the shutdown process and the flickering stopped. Who knows what order it will try and shut your apps down, but you might get lucky and it’ll get to this before it shuts down your apps.
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Good trick, Thank you !
Your comment prompted me to try to find another way of getting out… I always have a cmd open. I painstakingly switched to it and type pskill perfom (took me over 1 minute!) and it worked !
$ pskill perfmon
PsKill v1.12 – Terminates processes on local or remote systems
Copyright (C) 1999-2005 Mark Russinovich
Sysinternals – http://www.sysinternals.com
2 processes named perfmon killed.
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