Make yourself a real administrator in Vista

[ivgeo]

Quote:One of the new things which were introduced by Windows Vista is brand new user accounts management, which allows system administrators to create various user accounts with strictly limited permissions. This may be handy for someone in net café or parents who want to protect the computer from their children, but it may cause also a lot of troubles for more experienced people.

The problem of UAC in Vista is that even if you set yourself as the administrator, you won’t be able to do some simple tasks and you will be still swamped by a lot of useless dialogs and confirmation windows. I’m talking avout prompts for folder/file permissions errors sometimes or you’ll need to right click and select “Run as Administrator” for most applications to work/install correctly. That’s because Microsoft made the administrators accounts (in local administrators group) run as standard users, unless we give permissions for every and each administrative tasks, with a little difference when UAC is turned on/off.

Here’s the simple solution: Remember that cute “Administrator” account you see when you login to safe mode? That’s the built-in administrator account that’s installed by default, and disabled by default too, after a little digging-in I made this tutorial that’ll let you enable and use this account in normal mode, and with a little other tweak, enjoying an XP-like administrator experience, while UAC is left ON (or off, it doesn’t matter), but with no prompts or right clicks.

1- Click Start, and type “secpol.msc” in the search area and click Enter.
2- You may receive a prompt from UAC, approve/login and proceed.
3- In the left list, choose “Local Policies”, then “Security Options”
4- Set “Accounts: Administrator account status” to Enabled.
5- Set “User Account Control: Admin Approval Mode for the Built-in Administrator account” to Disabled.
6- Now log-off, and you’ll see a new account named “Administrator” will be available, click on it to login.

Now you are the master of your domain! I recommend if you’re going to use this method is to apply it as soon as you do a fresh install of Windows, so you can simply delete whatever administrator you created in the setup process, and make this one the “real” administrator for your PC, also you can rename this new admin account or change its password like any other account from “User Accounts” in the Control Panel. I’m sure many of you will be happy to have 100% power over their new operating system (thx Tantawi for this tip).

Original article: http://www.rlslog.net/make-yourself-a-re...-in-vista/

[ivgeo]

Other solutions
2.

nuvola3311 Wrote:If you are running Business or Ultimate:
Right click on computer and select manage. Under computer management expand Local Users and groups. Highlight Users and all of the users should appear to the right. Right click on the Administrator entry and select properties. Under the General tab uncheck the option for "Account is Disabled"

3.

nuvola3311 Wrote:Steps to activate the Administrator account in Vista.
Click on start -> type ‘cmd’ -> right click on Command Prompt -> select ‘run as administrator’,
In the command prompt type ‘net users Administrator /active’ (‘A’ caps in Administrator) and press enter, you will get a confirmation as ‘The command completed successfully’.
You can check the status of the account by the command ‘net users Administrator’,
‘User name Administrator

Account active Yes’

Type exit to close the command prompt.

Click on start and click on Switch User, now you should see a separate icon for ‘Administrator’.
Click on Administrator account, by default it has no password, press enter.

[stuartjems]

Thank you for the useful information ivgeo. It worked wonderfully.

[badhackers]

alright none of these worked for the secpol.msc it couldnt find it and for the running cmd as an administrator i need the administrators password to allow that action to happen, if anyone could help me i would appreciate it very much.

[murad12s]

(11-04-2010 08:40 PM)badhackers Wrote:  alright none of these worked for the secpol.msc it couldnt find it and for the running cmd as an administrator i need the administrators password to allow that action to happen, if anyone could help me i would appreciate it very much.

Hey, it is the time to talk about windows 7 now