As a system administrator, it’s sometimes useful to be able to run applications as a different user, to test privileges or user based configurations.

This can be done from the command prompt using the ‘runas’ command.

runas [{/profile | /noprofile}] [/env] [{/netonly | /savecred}] [/smartcard] [/showtrustlevels] [/trustlevel] /user: " "

For example, to run notepad.exe as the user ‘johnsmith’ on the domain ‘ad.mydomain.com’ you could use:

runas /user:ad.mydomain.com\johnsmith notepad.exe

Once run, you will be prompted for the password of the selected user to continue.

If you are not joined to a machine, you can replace the domain with the local machine name.