Change environment variables as standard user (Windows 7)

Question

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?" )

Answer 1

Just type "environment" into the start menu. One option you are presented will be "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

rundll32 sysdm.cpl,EditEnvironmentVariables

is the command used to present that dialog. You can put a shortcut to that somewhere if you like.

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¹ There are exceptions, such as installing a loopback network adapter. I looked for a few minutes before finally finding how to do that. But those things are hardly common scenarios :-)

Answer 2

In addition to searching (as Johannes mentioned), "Change my environment variables" is listed under "Tasks" on the "User Accounts" control panel.

From the command line, you can create/modify persistent environment variables using the setx command, which is included in Windows Vista (and presumably Windows 7 too) and was part of the Windows Resource Kit Tools before that.