"Living" in admin account all day?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Doug Kanter
  • Start date Start date
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Doug Kanter

Somewhere is the distant past, I read that XP's admin account should be used
only for maintenance, and that it should not be anyone's regular working
account. I don't recall the reason. Can someone fill me in on this?
 
Doug said:
Somewhere is the distant past, I read that XP's admin account should
be used only for maintenance, and that it should not be anyone's
regular working account. I don't recall the reason. Can someone fill
me in on this?
Click to expand...

The main reason not to use the built-in administrator account on a day to
day basis is that if that account gets corrupted, then the ONLY way into
your machine is by a repair install of XP (unless you have a Barts PE CD to
hand). best to have another Admin-rights account for day to day usage.
 
Doug said:
Somewhere is the distant past, I read that XP's admin account should be used
only for maintenance, and that it should not be anyone's regular working
account. I don't recall the reason. Can someone fill me in on this?
Click to expand...


Routinely using a computer with administrative privileges is not
without some risk. You will be much more susceptible to some types of
malware, particularly adware and spyware. While using a computer with
limited privileges isn't the cure-all, silver bullet that some claim it
to be, any experienced IT professional will verify that doing so
definitely reduces that amount of damage and depth of penetration by the
malware. If you get infected/infested while running as an
administrator, the odds are much greater that any malware will be
extremely difficult, if not impossible, to remove with formating the
hard drive and starting anew. The intruding malware will have the same
privileges to all of the files on your hard drive that you do.

A technically competent user who is aware of the risks and knows
how to take proper precautions can usually safely operate with
administrative privileges; I do so myself. I simply don't recommend it
for the average computer user.


--

Bruce Chambers

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