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Featured Plugins & Addons • Using HWiNFO with Rainmeter

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Hello all!

This post is a public service announcement to let you know about a new (undocumented) enhancement made to HWiNFO recently that will make using Rainmeter easier to run for anyone who is not an administrator on their PC. This is quite a common situation in the corporate world, at least for any company that has the tiniest clue about cyber security. This enhancement only applies to skins that retrieve HWiNFO sensor data from registry, not from the old HWiNFO plugin that uses Shared Memory.

Background
Because HWiNFO accesses hardware directly, it requires the user to run the application with elevated privileges. If the user is not an admin, Windows will not allow the user to elevate any process, so as a result he/she must run the app with alternate credentials that do have admin privileges.

Unfortunately, once this is done, Windows (and thus Rainmeter) cannot see the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive of the admin user, which is where HWiNFO stores the sensor data. The simple workaround is to also run Rainmeter elevated as that same admin user. This means two annoying prompts for alternate credentials and two more prompts for elevations and no ability to auto-run either app without some serious workarounds.

TL;DR
If you are the developer of a skin that requires HWiNFO to work and you do not care about supporting users who are not admins on their PCs, or your skins use the legacy HWiNFO plugin to fetch sensor data, there is nothing more you need to do. You users can continue doing whatever is needed for their situation.
Have a nice day! :)

HWiNFO Enhancement and What You Need to Do to Use It
As of HWiNFO v8.16, HWiNFO now writes sensor data to both the HKEY_CURRENT_USER and the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE registry hives simultaneously. By changing your Registry measures to point to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, your users will no longer need to run Rainmeter elevated. You will still need to elevate HWiNFO, but not Rainmeter.

Updating your skins is as simple as globally changing your HWiNFO registry measures from this RegHKey=HKEY_CURRENT_USER to this RegHKey=HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

Thanks, and hopefully this helps everyone.

Statistics: Posted by SilverAzide — Yesterday, 10:43 pm — Replies 124 — Views 675944



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