Running your SharePoint dev environment as a domain user is pretty much a requirement. But running a SharePoint dev environment without being local administrator is also a pain.
To grant your domain user the appropriate rights for being a local admin and being able to run everything as administrator without specifically asking to “Run as administrator” you have to do the following.
- Add domain account to the local administrators group with the following command line (must be run as a local admin):
net localgroup administrators /add domain\user - Run gpedit.msc and go to Windows Settings > Security Settings > Security Options and set the User Account Control policies as show on the image.
On earlier versions of windows you could go to the control panel and the users account and modify the UAC settings from there, which would effectively make you run everything as administrator without the need to use run as administrator, but this doesn’t work on windows 8 or windows server 2012, not that option just removes the prompt of whether or not you are sure you want to run as an administrator.