With Windows Vista, Microsoft chose to increase their focus on the security of the Windows operating system, and as part of this they chose to disable the Administrator account and restrict the privileges of the everyday user account. With User Account Control, the user is instead prompted to enter their credentials when trying to perform an admin-like task.

There are good security-related reasons not to run as Admin. all the time. If you are using an Admin. account and an exploit, spyware, or other undesirable program makes it onto your computer, it has the potential to do much more damage than with a standard user account. It can access other users' data, install kernel-mode keyloggers, rootkits, or other nasty programs which are extremely difficult to detect, cover its tracks very effectively, run under all users, and even make your computer unbootable (4).

While Administrator accounts do carry risks, they also have their uses, and an advanced user may wish to enable the Administrator account in Vista for troubleshooting purposes perhaps, or because they are interested in tweaking their system or experimenting. I will go over the steps for how to both enable, and disable, this account.

The Administrator account can be enabled from the Command Line, and first you'll need to open a command prompt in Administrator mode. To do this, one way is to find the Command Prompt entry under Start, Accessories, right-click on it and choose "Run as Administrator". Another way is to go to Start, Run and type 'cmd', after which it should warn you that it will run will elevated privileges (1).

Once you have the command prompt open, you can then activate the Administrator account using the following command: 'net user administrator /active:yes' (minus the quotes). Type this in and press Enter, and if you have entered the command correctly you should see a message that says "The command completed successfully." (2) When you log out and log back in you should see the Administrator account listed (2). It will not have a password so you should go in and add one. If you would like to disable the account, you can go through the same command-line steps, swapping in '/active:no' in the command.

References:
1)http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/02/17/how-to- open-elevated-command-prompt-with-administrator-priv ileges-in-windows-vista/
2)http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/ena ble-the-hidden-administrator-account-on-windows-vist a/
3)http://lifehacker.com/341521/enable-vistas-admin istrator-account
4)http://blogs.msdn.com/aaron_margosis/archive/200 4/06/17/157962.aspx

Learn more about this author, April Storme.
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