How do i get administrative rights on windows vista

So this is a work-around if you'd like to leave your Administrator account enabled. It's important to protect it with a password that's not easy to guess or arrive at by trial and error. Despite what it may seem to some people, Microsoft's decision to disable and lightly hide the Administrator account in Windows was a very good one. Millions of people have for many years been living in this account -- many without even having set a password for it. Doing so makes it easy for malware and hackers to waltz into an account that has unlimited access to the operating system.

By changing the name for the account on your computer that has administrative privileges, and by setting a password for it, Windows security is raised considerably. The user experience for dealing with User Account Control elevations, although improved in Windows Vista Post-Beta-2 Build , is still a little rough. Microsoft has designed UAC in a way that keeps you from having to reboot between changes, but there are still too many nuisance UAC prompts.

There's still development time to go on Vista's User Account Controls. Online editorial director Scot Finnie has been an editor for a variety of IT publications for more than 20 years.

This article was adapted from the July issue of Scot's Newsletter and is used by permission. Scot Finnie, former Editor in Chief of Computerworld, is a freelance writer with decades of experience covering the IT industry.

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Bill Smithers Volunteer Moderator. Hi, If this is not applicable, you have to reinstall the operating system. How satisfied are you with this reply? Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site. In reply to Bill Smithers's post on May 15, In this post, we will review a few methods of how to enable the Administrator Account in Windows The built-in administrative account is still present in the newest operating system.

Window 11 traditionally hides it, and you need to activate it manually. Since Windows Vista, Microsoft has changed how administrative accounts behave. Windows automatically creates the main account, Administrator, but hides it. Users with administrative accounts have to confirm their intention to change important settings.

Standard users must know credentials for one of the administrative accounts to do any task that requires a User Account Control approval.

However, if you start Windows 11 in Safe Mode, it will enable the built-in Administrator account and activate it. Also, it is possible to unhide that account for regular working mode. Before you continue, you may need to check what's the current state of the Administrator account. Alternatively, you can right-click the Start button to open the same menu. Now, type net user administrator and hit Enter. In the output, find the line Account active.

That's an easy and quick method to get it enabled. However, I don't recommend you to use it instead of your regular user account. You can solve this problem as follows:. This page shows content from our old website. It might move in the near future. To get the most up to date information, please use the navigation menu at the top. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.