Is it possible to temporarily raise account privilege in XP Home

[Martin Cantell]

I have a new PC with WinXP Home SP2 installed.
I have 3 accounts: mine as computer administrator; two others as limited
access users.
I am currently in the process of getting the machine back together again
after a complete rebuild and upgrade (was using Win98SE on an old machine).
I am finding that I occassionally have a few problems setting things up that
require that the user I am configuring to have elevated priviliges to do.

The question I have is - Does XP Home give you a way to quickly go into a
password protected admin privilige to allow me to make the change and then
drop back down to the usual restricted access that the user has normally? At
the moment, I have to log out of the users account, log back into mine, make
the change, log out of my account and log back into the users account. This
is a right pain!

Thanks for any help that you can provide.

Martin

 

[Guest]

Hi Martin,

As far as I know you have to do the administrative settings as an
administrator and then log back on as the limited user like you have been and
as you stated its a right pain.

The easiest way to setup a multi user machine is set them all up as
administrators and then right at the end when you have configured everything
switch the accounts you want as limited to limited.

what are you changing ? and how often ? give us some more details and
perhaps I may be able to suggest some further options around the problem.

Andy W

 

[Mac]

Run as...

 

[Guest]

Run as . . . allows you to run a program as an admistrator, but if Martin
wants to change an administrative setting he would have to logon as himself.

Andy W

 

[Martin C]

Hopefully, I will not need to do it that often, but I currently have all my
data files on my second disc (pulled out from my old PC). What I am in the
process of doing, is copying relevant data files from that drive to the new
drive in the new PC (they are both in the new case).

The problem I found was that I had copied the user data file to their
documents folder and thought that would be it! However, when I went into
their user account and went to their 'My Documents' folder. When I tried to
move a file that was in the wrong place to one of the sub folders, I was
told that I did not have access to it due to priviliges. This is presumably
because I had set up their folders as my admin account, so they were not
allowed to do anything with it.

To get round it, I had to go into my account, delete the copied files and
folders from their account, raise their privilige to admin, go into their
account and copy the data from the second drive all over again. Reducing
their priviliges again afterwards allowed them to copy files within their
own folders.

There may have been an easier way to have done that, but other situations
will arise.

eg) To use Webshots as a wallpaper manager to cycle wallpapers each day
cannot be done from their accounts. If I do it, they may not have access to
what they want to do afterwards (like add extra pictures). This means they
have to be as admin to setup the Webshots how it is wanted, then reduce the
privilige again afterwards.

As you state, I could just leave it all as admin accounts until everything
is setup, but as one user is a child and the other almost computer
illiterate, I am a bit loathe to let them have full access while they are
stilll learning how to use the new OS anyway. Even I have to be careful with
some of the things that are new to me - and I am far from a PC bonehead. Not
to mention security issues!

Thanks for your quick replies, and thanks for any help you can provide.

Martin

 

[Guest]

I think if you contact webshots their may be a solution to that problem
because I had it on a customer's work machine once and I think we resolved it
but it meant editing the registry, etc.

Send an email to Webshots, asking them how to use Webshots as a limited user.

Andy W

 

[Martin C]

Thanks Andy, I'll do that.

I think if you contact webshots their may be a solution to that problem
because I had it on a customer's work machine once and I think we resolved
it
but it meant editing the registry, etc.

Send an email to Webshots, asking them how to use Webshots as a limited
user.

Andy W