New admin account on HP mini netbook (Windows 7)

[Neill75]

Hi

A good friend of mine gave me an old netbook that he no longer wanted because he never used it. I created a new admin account under my name then deleted my friends old admin account while keeping the files. Ive read that you should always have two admin accounts so I did a system restore to bring back my friends old admin account. Should I delete his account then create two new admin accounts or recreate my admin account and keep my friends? Ive read that theres a hierarchy amongst admin accounts on Windows 7 so my concern would be that my account always has the main privileges. Grateful for any responses. Im reasonably tec savy but not overly so it would be most helpful if your answers are idiot proof (me beig the idiot!!)

 

[oscer1]

Hi welcome to the forum.

this is how I have mine setup is one admin account and the rest standard user. their is a hidden administrator account. which you can get to by following this, but you should not be using it for daily use. http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/507-built-administrator-account-enable-disable.html

 

[Alejandro85]

Ive read that you should always have two admin accounts so I did a system restore to bring back my friends old admin account. Should I delete his account then create two new admin accounts or recreate my admin account and keep my friends?

No idea where you got that from, but doesn't makes any sense to me. You may have any number of accounts you want, but unless you have a specific use for each one it's just a waste to have more than one.

A frequently given advice (and almost always carefully ignored ) is to use two accounts, one being an admiinistrator and the other standard. You use the standard for almost everything and the admin is there only to run installers and a few more global affecting processes. That would be my recommendation, in addition to delete every other account not in use from your friend.

Ive read that theres a hierarchy amongst admin accounts on Windows 7 so my concern would be that my account always has the main privileges.

That's almost false. All adminstrator accounts are the same and can do exactly the same things, with one particular exception: the built-in "administrator" account.
That account has the particularity of being impossible to delete, has a fixed SID (an internal identifier) and, by default, runs always with full permissions instead of requiring UAC elevations. But other than that, it's equal to any other account.

The fact that an user account is an administrator means that the account can do fundamentally anything he wants with the system. Any admin can, and they're all fundamentally equal.
It's also preferable that your main account is the one with the least privileges (ie, non-admin). You can always elevate to admin in the few cases where it's needed, and you get a security boost with that simple distinction.