Connect to remote PC with TeamViewer QuickSupport using admin credentials

When using TeamViewer to connect to a remote PC running QuickSupport, it is not immediately obvious that you can actually connect to a session using administrator credentials, allowing you to undertake actions on the remote PC with elevated privileges.

Usually, when you connect to a PC with QuickSupport and you initiate an action that requires administrator privileges, as soon as Windows pops up the UAC prompt, all you see is a black screen and you can’t interact with it to enter the relevant credentials.

Here’s what you need to do to in order to make it all work.

1. First up, you need the end user to download and run the QuickSupport client. They can do this as an unprivileged user
2. You then create a session on your TeamViewer and set it to start later
3. Ask the remote user to enter in the session code that you’ve generated
4. Once the user is in the “lobby” waiting for you to connect, you can click on the 3 dots next to the join session button
5. Click on the “Windows Authentication” option
6. Enter in the username (As it appears when the user enters “net localgroup Administrators” in cmd) and the password of the admin account
7. When you attempt to join, the user will get a UAC prompt, but it won’t prompt them to enter the admin credentials, they can just press “yes”
8. That’s it. Boom – you’re in as admin!

Optional: If you’re doing this because TeamViewer Host has somehow got into a broken state and you can’t connect to it, you can select Action (up the top) -> Update Remotely to fix the TeamViewer host install. I am not sure if this can install TeamViewer Host from scratch, but the wording that the prompts gave on the end user machine made me think it may be able to.