Solved Admin rights

[PinkiPad]

Occasionally I need admin rights to do something. I've never set a pass as admin. How do I set myself as admin? No one else uses my laptop. Win 7 Home, 64-bit.

I've been running Windows since 3.1 and don't ever remember being asked to prove I'm admin.

 

[Brink]

Hello PinkiPad,

Ever since Windows Vista and above, the administrator account is actually runs "unelevated". When you do anything that requires elevated rights, you get prompted by UAC to approve first.

This is a security feature to prevent anything from running with elevated rights (run as administrator) without you having a chance to say Yes or No from a UAC prompt first. Anything that runs elevated has full unrestricted access to everything on the PC. This is why this is such a great security feature. Yeah, it could be a pain to have to approve first, but what's a couple of seconds to approve versus not having that option and some malware is able to run elevated in the background without you ever knowing.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/11841-run-administrator.html
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If you still want to be king of the castle per say, then you could enable the built-in "elevated" Administrator account to log on to for this.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/507-built-administrator-account-enable-disable.html
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Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[PinkiPad]

Thank you SO much. My head is spinning! Built-in seems like it would work best; always the admin, not having to login 20 times a day.

 

[Wrend]

I only run as the administrator from the "hidden" account. I have never had any problems with this and have other safeguards in place. I haven't actually had any problems with malware, viruses, or the like since before 2000 (both the OS and the year).

That being said, I never recommend anyone else does this. This isn't a "use at your own risk" kind of thing; it's more of a don't use unless you know for sure that you know how to deal with it and maintain and protect your computer, have whole system backups on external devices that can be reloaded whenever you want, don't allow anything to connect to the internet without your permission, and the like.

 

[Brink]

Thank you SO much. My head is spinning! Built-in seems like it would work best; always the admin, not having to login 20 times a day.

You're most welcome.

 

[PinkiPad]

Blech! Everything changed. My desktop, toolbar, icons. Then I open Firefox and all settings, passwords, bookmarks, etc are gone. Before I opened anything else, I switched users.

I didn't realize the settings on this laptop were mine. I thought they were just in the computer itself.

I think for the future I will log in as me. IF that popup pops up, I will jot down where I was, switch user to admin, then return to that page.

 

[Brink]

Yeah, each account will have it's own settings and such.

 

[PinkiPad]

Ewww. If needed, I'll be admin. Otherwise, I'm happy as lowly laptop owner.