Vista - Administer Account Password

Does having a password assigned to the Administer Account give it more control or power than not having a password. Or just to keep anyone from making changes to a computer. Reason for this question is I was told it did more when installing or uninstalling programs to have one. Made no sense to me.

Thanks

Hi Camper, and welcome to Vista Forums.

Not sure about that either. The whole purpose of a password is for security to keep people from logging on to your account, or from a user giving administrator permission when they get a UAC prompt.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Short answer: No.

Long(er) answer: The level of "power" (ie. permissions) that an account has is defined solely by what user/security group memberships it has, and what permissions those groups are granted.

The sole purpose for a password, as you noted, is to require its knowledge to access an account. The presence or lack of a password does nothing to increase/decrease your user-rights.

Thanks Itwally, that helps. What "power" or how high can a Administer get or go too. If you can give more on this, would like.

Administrator accounts have more rights than any other account on a Windows system. Also, they alone have the power to give themselves additional privileges.

By default, admins can edit the registry, create and manage user accounts, assign disk quotas and permissions, take possession of files and folders, install drivers, join domains, etc etc.

Because administrator accounts have so much power, it is ill-advised to perform your day-to-day activities running as an admin. The increased user-rights are not necessary, and should you catch a virus, it may be able to spread into your system more aggressively because it was launched by an admin.

Inexperienced users should not run as admins. The likelihood of you accidentally nuking your system is much higher than if you ran as a normal user.

Hi camper913,

When you install Vista, you create an account. This account is an administrator account and for security reasons you should also create a password. Note that this account is not the same as the built-in administrator account, which is disabled by default. The first thing that you should do is to create another account for everyday user. Make this a standard account, and obviously give it a different name and password to the other account.