If you’re one of those people who are frequently tinkering with the inner workings of their computers you will probably be fed up with User Account Control continually popping up and asking you for permission to do things.
One solution to this is to turn off User Account Control, but this is a security risk and not one we would recommend, however what we would recommend that people do is to activate the hidden Administrator account.
Before the advent of Windows Vista, Microsoft didn’t hide the Administrator account, and the majority of people used it as their main user account. This Administrator account had full access rights over the computer, which we would never recommend for a day to day account.
With the release of Windows Vista, Microsoft changed all that. In Vista, the proper Administrator account is not subject to UAC alerts, but normal administrator accounts are. So the Administrator account can do as much system maintenance as necessary without continued UAC alerts.
Activating the proper Administrator account is simple.
- Open an elevated command prompt by typing cmd into the Search box on the Start menu, right-clicking the command prompt icon that appears at the top of the Start menu, then selecting ‘Run as administrator’.
- Once the command prompt window is open type in Net user administrator /active:yes and press Enter
When you next re-boot, the Administrator account will appear on the Welcome screen, along with any user accounts, note however that it will not have a password set until you log in to it and set one, so we recommend you do that immediately.
If at anytime you want to disable the Administrator account
- Open an elevated command prompt by typing cmd into the Search box on the Start menu, right-clicking the command prompt icon that appears at the top of the Start menu, then selecting ‘Run as administrator’.
- Once the command prompt window is open type in Net user administrator /active:no and press Enter