Vista - Changed name of Administrator Account - now daily user - is that a problem?

Folks,

Last weekend I was setting up our new computer (Intel E8600, Asus P5k, 4GB RAM etc) with Vista Home Premium (64-bit) SP1. I set up user accounts for the family, installed a few programmes & updates, transferred some files etc etc. I had some difficulty networking with my Windows XP computer which got me exploring the new Vista set-up.

What I appear to have done is, instead of setting up a new account for myself on Vista, I seem to have re-named the Administrator Account as “Tom”. The logon screen has Tom as a user (no Administrator). When logged in as Tom, if I save a file in Documents and then open Documents using Orb > Documents it is there. However, if I open up Windows Explorer > Users then there is both Administrator & Tom and the file is in the Administrator > Documents and Tom > Documents is actually empty. As another example, if I check the pathway to my e-mail folders they are in Users > Administrator > AppData….

So I seem to be using the Administrator Account as my routine user logon. My question is – is this a problem? Things seem to be working all right – I even managed to access my User shared files (rather than just the Public folders) on the Vista from the XP computer with user name Administrator + my “Tom” password (pure guesswork)?! Seeing some of the other posts about having to access the hidden Administrator account I wonder whether it might be quite useful?

The other question is, if it is a problem, how do I change it? In Control panel > Users > Tom it will not re-name to Administrator as that account already exists, there is no option to ‘delete user’ (I guess because it is the Administrator account?). If I go into the side-link for advanced user configuration there is both the \Administrator\ and the \Tom\ profile with a ‘delete’ option – could I delete Tom & then create a normal account allowing the Administrator to become hidden?

The only way I have seen on the forum to change the Administrator account name back to Administrator is to do a restore – this would be a pain as I would have to go back a week & start all over again (the kids would be cross). I think my default is ‘if it ain’t broke – don’t fix it’ but I don’t want to be heading for a catastrophe – and if I need to do a restore I need to do it before the timepoint drops out of the memory.

Thanks for your thoughts,

Cheers, T.

Hi Tom

It might be in a microsoft knowladgebase, it's valid for XP too:
'when you change a user account name the folder name isn't changed'
so the administrator account that you renamed to tom is using the
administrator folder

the other administrator account that you created isn't using the same
administrator folder, it can't. it's using some other name could be
administrator001 or something similer

you might have the option but you can't delete the built in administrator
account (even if you renamed it and "created" a similer username). delete the
administrator account that you created then rename tom back to administrator

that should restore things back to default

"tommyh1958" wrote: