Monday, December 22, 2008

Activate Administrator Account in Windows Vista

There were couple of reasons which forced me to enable and activate the administrator account in Windows Vista (Home Premium) otherwise generally it is advisable not to use the administrator account for each and every activity on your computer as it make your computer more prone to virus attack.
1st reason was installation of Anti Virus which required a true Administrator account log on.
2nd reason was annoying (yet useful alerts) UAC (User Access Control) pop ups when you run any executable.
3rd reason was that you don't have to run most of the programs by selecting 'Run as Administrator'.
And there may be more reasons as well.
Now coming back to 'How to enable, show, activate, use, logon to a true Windows Vista administrator account' -

Step 1 - Log on as a normal user to you vista
Step 2 - Click on Start and then Search for cmd.
Step 3 - In the search result pane, right click on cmd and select 'Run As Administrator'.
Step 4 - In the command prompt window, type this command

net user administrator pa$$word

Note: a) This command will set the pa$$word as your login password for administrator account
b) You can type any other password instead of pas$$word that you want
c) If you want to use a blank password you can skip this step # 4 and directly go to step # 5

Step 5 - Type the following command and press Enter to activate and enable Administrator account:

net user administrator /active:yes

It should display the following message

The command completed successfully

If no success message is displayed, repeat the process from Step # 1 again.
Step 6 - Logout from Windows Vista by choosing restart or switch user
Step 7 - Voila! you get an extra icon for Administrator on the login screen
Step 8 - Click on Administrator icon and logon with the password you have mentioned in Step # 4 above

You are done!

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