Not to disagree with Robert's fine advice, but if you do not put a password
on an account you had better make sure your computer is physically secure. In
other words, do not use blank passwords on computers that move about, like
laptops.
Hopefully, Robert's explanation of the rest of the question made sense. If
not, think of it this way:
When you log in as an administrator on Vista, by default, you are
essentially "half an admin." The operating system creates a token for your
user account that contains all the groups you are a member off. That token is
used to validate all access. In essence, it is a representation of you that
the OS uses to determine what you can do. However, it does not contain the
group Administrators (at least not in a way that grants you access to
anything) even though you are a member of that group. When you try to do
something that requires administrative privilege the OS detects that, and
also knows that you are actually a member of the Administrators group, so it
just asks whether you want to perform the operation. If you say yes, it
creates a copy of your token but with the Administrators group in it, and
then uses that token to perform the operation.
If you log in as a standard user, on the other hand, you cannot just add the
Administrators group to your token since you are not an administrator at all.
Therefore, when a standard user tries to perform an administrative operation
the OS asks for credentials (password) for an administrative user instead. If
you provide correct credentials the OS creates a brand new token for the
administrative user and then uses that token to perform the operation.
You can configure the prompt to behave certain ways using the Local Security
Policy tool. For instance, if you want all users to supply a password you can
configure it to ask for credentials for administrators as well.
Does that make any sense?
"Robert Moir" wrote:
> GT wrote:
> > are you saying that if a user is administrator with a password it
> > will only prompt without the password in UAC.
>
> Yes. Think about it logically - you've already supplied the password, why
> ask for it again? (Not entirely sure I agree with this myself, just
> presenting the reasoning behind how this works...)
>
> > so i will have two
> > accout a administrator account and a standard account. Do i need to
> > put password on the standard account or can i just leave it with
> > blank?
>
> Yep, 2 accounts. One admin with password and one standard without a password
> will be fine, though frankly I myself always use passwords and wouldn't do
> without.
>
>
>