Run Elgato Stream Deck as administrator in Windows 10

I love my Elgato Stream Deck, I use it for photo- and audio editing, and also for coding with Visual Studio. This is where the trouble starts. As I need to run Visual Studio 2019 with Admin privileges, to give IISExpress access to port 80, I discovered Stream Deck was not translating the key actions. The solution is not that easy as selecting a checkbox in for instance a desktop shortcut. In this article I describe the actions needed to fix the issue.

If you want to use Stream Deck to control apps running with administrator privileges in Windows 10 some tweaking is required. This because the streamdeck.exe also needs to run with administrator privileges. As no --admin command line option or such is available, another solution is needed. 

With the following steps you can start the Stream Deck service as admin on start-up. Some Windows knowledge is a pre, as we dive under the hood of Windows and use system application like Scheduler and Regex.

Create scheduler task

As we can’t set the admin privileges through the user interface or start menu, we first need to create a scheduler task. The scheduler gives more options which we need. We set up the scheduler to start the Stream Deck executable every time on startup.

• Type Task Scheduler in the Start search bar. Open the app.
• Select Create task under Actions.
• Under the general tab, give the task a name, Stream Deck. Check Run with highest privileges and select configure for Windows 10.

• Under the Action tab, click on the New button, select Start a program in the action dropdown and browse for the Stream Desk executable. In the Add arguments enter --runinbk

• Under the Settings tab, ensure that the Allow task to be run on demand is checked.
• Hit OK, and the task will be created.

Create shortcut to run task

Now we have the task setup, we need to be able to run it, every time you start your pc or log-on.

Easiest way to do this is to temporarily create the short-cut on your desktop and move it to the startup folder.

• Right-click on the desktop and click New > Shortcut.
• In the shortcut wizard type schtasks /run /TN “Stream Deck”. Stream deck being the name of the task you created. Click Next and give the short-cut a name, Stream Deck. Click Finish.

• Lastly move the shortcut to your startup folder.

To locate your start-up folder, click Windows-R and type shell:startup. It will return your startup folder. For instance: c:\users\yourusername\ AppData\Roaming\ Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\ Programs\Startup

Remove default start-up link

Last step is removing the original start-up entry that was created by the Elgato installer. 

There are several ways tom do this.

• Disable in task manager
  Type Task Manager in the Start search bar. Select Startup tab and locate the Stream Deck entry. Click Disable.
• Remove the entry from the registry. This is a permanent action unlike the task manager option!
  Type Registry editor in the Start search bar.
  Locate the StreamDeck.exe startup entry. Probably in: \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
  Locate the Stream Deck entry and delete it.

Bonus: StreamDeck Plugin

If you want to start programs as administrator from your Stream Deck I’d advise to install the Advanced Launcher (BarRaider) plugin.