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Friday, August 31, 2012

PeerBlock not launching automatically at Windows 8 startup?

Peerblock will not run on Windows 8 at startup, even though it is listed in the startup items list. This could be because it requires UAC elevation.
If you don't know what Peerblock is, go to this link.
But there is a way to get it to launch at startup. You use Task Scheduler. There is a trigger to run a task at startup, and what's different about this and the normal startup routine is that you can run a task as an Admin. Hence the UAC elevation thingy does not become a problem in this case.
The exact steps are actually given on their website. There is no need to post this problem in the forums.
Visit this link for the instructions.

Or follow the screenshots below.

Launch Task Scheduler


 Create a new task








Change some settings in PeerBlock for seemless behavior



That's it.

Apparently the problem is not with just Windows 8. This has been a problem ever since UAC was introduced to the equation. Up until now (in Windows 7), I had been running the native Administrator account, so I never encountered this. Now that you cannot run Windows 8 Metro apps under the native Administrator account, you have to use a regular "under-privileged" admin account.

These guys are saying that they will fix this problem in version 3, because it requires rewriting the application from the scratch. But there is no roadmap.

2 comments:

  1. You can use Startup Delayer software to start Peerblock with Windows 7/8.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. thanks for the comment. i didn't know that. i'd rather not use another software just for this, because you can do it with the scheduled tasks which is built in to the OS. but someone else might find it useful. :)

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