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Change environment variables as standard user

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 2026186959 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

When clicking on "Advanced system settings", I need to login as the administrator and hence only edit the administrators environment variables (in addition to the machine wide ones). How do I edit the environment variables of a standard user? Details With the migration to Windows 7, I decided to work as a standard user instead of an unprivileged administrator. Works well so far but I encountered a tiny problem: When I try to change per user environment variables via the control panel I have to login as an administrator. But since I run that part of the control panel as the administrator I can only edit the administrators variables. How am I supposed to edit my own environment variables? Without resorting to extreme measures, such as editing the registry (as suggested in "Is there any command line tool that can be used to edit environment variables in Windows?" )

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Fix for: Change environment variables as standard user

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Just type “environment” into the start menu (or press Win+S in Windows 10 and search for “Edit environment variables for your account”). Similarly, searching for “environment” in the control panel yields that option, too. Generally, I have noticed that simply searching for something in the start menu or control panel is much faster than trying to remember a series of icons, dialogs, etc. one has to access to find something. At least for the vast majority of tasks1. A little digging yields that …

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