It was with Windows XP that security concerns were taken very seriously in operating systems and many security features were introduced. The most important and widely accepted measure was the advent of the NTFS file system, which gave security a whole new definition. With NTFS as your file system, you can set security according to your needs and requirements and one can customise the security settings in almost any possible way. If you do not wish your children to browse files of a certain partition, you can easily stop their access. Anything and everything available on the hard drive can be secured easily using the New Technology File System commonly known as NTFS. In NTFS you can make any changes, but if anyone can make the changes in security settings then what is the relevance of security. The answer to this is that not all can change the security settings, but only people who are administrators of the computer can make such changes. But again a question arises that who will make some of the users a part of the administrative group? The answer is the default administrator account which is created by Windows. This user has all the rights of the computer and can even control the other users who are part of the administrative group. This can be called as the super administrator of the computer. In Windows XP and later there are several tasks which can only be done by an administrator like installation, un-installation of hardware and software, user management, system management, hard drive management and a lot more. By default this account is not visible and is available for logging in, but we can easily make it active if we wish to login to it.
In this post I will discuss the way to gain administrative privileges for working in the core areas of Windows.
Step 1: Open the Command Prompt. This can be done by pressing the ‘Start’ button and then typing ‘CMD’ in ‘Start’ menu’s search or in the ‘RUN’ box and pressing ‘Enter’.
Step 2: Once you have the Command Prompt open type and execute the following command without quotes “Net user administrator /active:yes”.
Step 3: Now close all the windows including the Command Prompt and log off from the current account.
Step 4: Now once you reach the Login menu you will see that a new account named Administrator is also listed as a Login option.
Step 5: Select this account and login. By default the password of this account is blank, but if not blank then you need to contact the person who installed Windows on your computer.
Step 6: Once you are in to this administrator account you can make any changes to the computer because this is the super administrator account.
Another easy way to gain access to this account is by starting your computer in Safe Mode, because in Safe Modes’ login window the administrator account is always visible and available for login.
