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I refuse to be that person.

A while back, I was having issues with my headphone mic. It was getting killed by the manufacturer’s config program. The mic would work until the program launched, then it was dead until I rebooted. Even killing the program with Task Manager wasn’t enough; I had to fully reboot. It was clearly an issue with the program, but the only thing they’d say was “lul try reinstalling.” I found a single lonely forum post with the same issue, and it didn’t have a solution. The issue is that the program also configured some other peripherals, so simply removing it from my startup programs wasn’t an option.

After a lot of troubleshooting, I finally figured out that it was because the program needed admin rights. Why did it need admin rights to use my mic? Who fucking knows. But you can’t run programs as an admin automatically at startup, for security purposes. And even if you could, you’d get the UAC prompt every single time you booted up. It’s a massive pain in the ass.

So instead, I created a .bat file to automatically launch the program with admin rights and skip the UAC, but you can’t run .bat files via startup programs. So I used the scheduler to automatically run it at login instead.

And then I went back to that one lonely forum post, and described the solution in excruciating detail, along with step-by-step screenshots, (but the explanation was enough to do it without the screenshots, in case the screenshots get purged by the image host later!)

My only hope is that it’ll be a beacon in the dark for the next lost and lonely soul who has the issue.