Vista - Administrator

I am totally new to Vista having switched over from XP three weeks ago when my old machine died (may it RIP).

I have been running under the account I set up when I started that I thought gave me full administrative privileges. However, as I have been rummaging through the tutorial under Vista Forums, I ran across an entry [Administrator Account seemed to say that I have actually been running under some sort of limited privileges and needed to log onto some sort of master Administrative account to have true administrative privileges.

I tried to go through the tutorial and referenced article on changing a file called "Unattend.xml"

Questions: [1] Is it true that when I log on I only have limited privileges? [2] Is there a more straightforward way of logging on as THE administrator?, and [3] Is there some hidden danger in doing this.

I am wondering since I am having problems with linking via Ctrl-Clicks on live links (due to some sort of hidden restriction) and thought that the differences in the privileges I have and Administrator privileges might be the cause.

Thanks

Jerry

Hello Jerry, and welcome to Vista Forums.

Q1) Even though you have an administrator account setup by default in Vista, Vista will require you to approve any program that wants to run as an administrator (elevated) first using UAC (User Account Control). When a program runs elevated, it has full access to the entire computer. UAC acts as a last line of defense to help prevent say malware programs from running as elevated without you knowing it and causing problems on your computer.

Q2) If you wanted to enable the built-in Administrator account, then you could also set Vista to log on to it automatically at startup.

Q3) This also applies for the reasons explained in Q1. The danger is that when you are logged on to the built-in Administrator account, not only do you have full access to everything on the computer, but everything that you have running will as well without UAC to ask you for permission first.

I'm not sure about your links problem. Did you do a clean install instead of upgrading from XP? Upgrades can usually carry over or cause some unknown issues to the upgraded installion of Vista.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Brink

Thanks for the reply, I will look into the links you sent me.

As far as the install, I had to purchase a new machine as the old one died with multiple hardware failures (it was old). So I am working on a new Dell desktop on which I applied sp2 and loaded most of my old programs (a few wouldn't).

Jerry

You might see if using Compatibility Mode with the older programs that do not run properly in Vista to see if it may be able to help then run properly afterwards. Sometimes it can help.