When you launch a program in your Windows PC, it is run as the currently logged in user which is usually a standard user. We can also launch programs with special administrator privileges easily because some changes in a Windows system can only be made through an administrator account.
But there are some modifications to the system that are not possible even for the administrator. For making those changes, you have to get the privileges of either System or TrustedInstaller. Both of these users exist in all the modern versions of Windows but are not accessible for the ordinary Windows user.
If you want to launch programs with the System user or TrustedInstaller privileges, then you can use a third-party software called RunX. This program is a portable application for Windows and can help you run any program with four different levels of privileges – as a standard user, as an administrator, as the system user and as TrustedInstaller.
As we launch the RunX program, it presents us with a window where we can choose the target program that we want to run and any command line parameters to pass for that program. We can choose any of the four different users – Basic user (lowest privileges), Current user (with administrator level access), system user and TrustedInstaller. We can also choose to run the target program inside the command prompt and capture the return code or error code left by RunX.
We tested RunX by launching PowerShell through RunX as TrustedInstaller. The reason is that in PowerShell we can give the command whoami and check the user who launched PowerShell. So after launching PowerShell 7.2 through RunX when we used whoami command, it clearly showeed NT Authority/System which is nothing but TrustedInstaller. RunX program worked as it was expected. But care must be taken when launching programs at such higher levels of access because you might end up making some unwanted changes to your system.
You can download RunX from https://www.d7xtech.com/free-software/runx/.