Run Commands As System User

Sometimes there may be a need to run a command as the system user however as you may have noticed it is not possible to log directly into this account. To get around this you can use the following work around.

1. Go to Start>Run and type in CMD then press enter.
2. In the new command prompt box type “at 09:00 /interactive cmd.exe” and press enter replacing the 09:00 with the time a few minutes ahead of what it is now. This creates a scheduled task in the interactive mode to launch at the time specified.
3. Once you reached the time set you will see a new command prompt box open similar to the following
4. This command prompt is now running as the system user and you should be able to issue any commands you want. As you can see I have run “intl.cpl” which loads the language and regional settings for the system user. In my case this was to change the time format for a service which was being run as the system user.