Running "as Administrator" on Windows
Running a program "as Administrator" on Windows causes it to run in a separate process space within which the normal protections are blocked. It is like running a program with sudo on Linux, only worse. Windows has rich inter-program communication (which
For example, say an
What would prompt someone to run a program "as Administrator" in the first place?
Fifteen years ago, when Windows Vista came out, and Microsoft introduced an enhanced set of security restrictions for Windows, existing programs often failed due to these new restrictions. This led to a wave of "solutions" where running these programs "as Administrator" bypassed the new security rules, restoring the programs' operation. "Try running it 'as Administrator', that might work."
Conclusion
While this was a useful workaround in the past, today's software should never require being run "as Administrator". To prevent inscrutable techical support issues caused by this, programs are increasingly detecting being run "as Administrator" and prohibiting it.