You have not answered my question though:
For 'daily use,' is it safe to be signed in as 'User' with Admin
priviledges?
In a general sense, no. From a best practices view, no. By running as
a limited user, viruses, trojans, worms, general malware will often be
restricted to infecting that user's account only. Since a "user"
doesn't have permissions to make changes outside his own area of
privileges, neither can malware. So the rest of the machine gains some
protection that way. Other users may not notice the intrusions and not
be affected.
By running as an admin, any malware then has the admin's permissions
to modify/change/add to/delete anything that admin has
rights/permissions for.
That's pretty much it in a nutshell, for a single-user machine.
A User may also have special permissions given to him. There are
"levels", such as Power User, most of an Admin's permissions but not
all, a backup admin, just like it sounds, can do backups others cannot,
and so on.
In other words yuo could if you want to assign SOME of the admin's
permissions to a User Account, but not all of them. It's better than a
full Admin account, but still each added permission opens another
possible area of damage.
IME it seems that more people run as Admins than do User accounts, for
whatever reason, usually the hassle of having to switch accounts to do
things. But don't forget, you usually can us the "Run As" and simply
choose your Admin account for that short period of time, then close that
user once you're done, and go back to work.
So it's best to run as a user. But not the most covenient. It's safer
to run as a user but more inconvenient. Perhaps setting yourself up as
a Power User might work for you instead of an Admin for day to day use.
See Help & Support for Power User for more info. Here's an
excerpt:
Power Users
Members of the Power Users group can create user accounts, but can
modify and delete only those accounts they create. They can create local
groups and remove users from local groups they have created. They can
also remove users from the Power Users, Users, and Guests groups.
They cannot modify the Administrators or Backup Operators groups, nor
can they take ownership of files, back up or restore directories, load
or unload device drivers, or manage the security and auditing logs.
HTH
Twayne
