When you think about starting from scratch, ideal would be to go trough funkyworms videos and turn your computer into a fort.

With formatting, you can basically eliminate chances of being infected at the first point. If scans from mbam and gmer come up clean, you're pretty much on the safe side and can just go ahead and turn the admin account you used so far into a user account to be protected in future.

Thanks!

good thread

ive been using a limited user on WinXP for ever. back in PT2 days there were a ton of hacks required to get PT2 working on a limited acct, now PT3 just requires admin.

So i just did this. Do not know why i never did this before as i had a dedicated admin account already, but my own user account still had admin privileges. FAIL.

just a tip for user who are doing this after reading the thread: It is not neccesary to set all the programs you normally use into run as admin mode. Before i turned my account into a standard user i scanned for malware and i turned every program i have on my PC into run as administrator. This means every program you run wants your admin pass, which is annoying as **** so don't do that. only do it on programs that NEED admin rights to run.

Can you install software on a normal user account?

of course, in that case you just have to enter your admin password.

Thanks for all the over-time hours.

i would like to be able to hide the admin user account in win7 on a friend's computer so that they will only log into the non-admin account where they need password verification to make changes. i haven't found any way to hide accounts from the login screen without actually disabling them, which is really bad if the remaining account is non-admin. (you can't gain admin even with pw)

i notice in your picture that you name the admin account "admin-disaster only". i take that to mean that this is also the only solution you know of.

Ok, so I did this and now everything is a huge pain in the ass.

I just want to return it to the way it was before but when I try to return administrator rights to my old original account nothing happens.

>start>control panel>add or remove user accounts> account name> change the account type and nothing happens.

edit: NM figured it out, I had to log in under the administrator account to do anything.

1. As Admin: start -> run -> type "secpol.msc"
As User: start -> type "local Security Policy" -> right click -> run as admin
2. "Local policies" > "Security Options" > Find the entry "Interactive Logon: Hide last user name" and set it to activated
3. Reboot

There should be a way to do that via the registry too imo, but if I understood you right, this would work too.

---------

Because you mentioned additional ways, there are like 5 or 6 probably even faster options to create/activate an admin account but this all depends on which exact win7 version you're using, so I had to pick a laborious way that applies to everyone no matter what.

Without creating an extra admin account because every windows machine has a hidden admin account already you would just:

Start -> type "cmd" press "CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER" to open the command prompt with admin rights and type: "net user administrator /active:yes"

You can disable it again with: "net user administrator /active:no"

If you unhide the built in admin account, it usually has no password at all. You have to set an password for this built in admin account or never think about enabling it at all.

Also, disabling it with no other admin account active on the machine will screw up some mechanics, depending on your windows version so use that way only if you're sure what you're doing.


Would you mind sharing what caused you issues?
The only difference I notice between admin and user account, that I open every program with "CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER" instead of just "ENTER" and that I have to enter my admin password, but that's about it.

thanks for the reply. i came up with kind of a ghetto workaround of installing the free version of returnil in the admin account, setting it to run in virtualmode on startup, and locking it down with a separate password. that way someone can still make changes on a guest account with a password, but if they decide to be a tard and use the admin account, they'll be running totally sandboxed and can't do much harm without the returnil pw. they also probably stop going into the admin account pretty quick when their changes keep poofing. it also has the added side benefit of giving you someplace to test software at lower risk, so maybe its not completely ghetto.

Thanks wellju.

Computer security is important to me.

i have done this and its great, no problems so must be fine. i do have a question tho... malware needs admin rights to do its work. which is why we use a non admin acct. since i will use my pw for admin to do certain things as a non admin i have removed pw from admin acct to make things quiker on myself. is this still secure? or am i alright as long as im not in an admin acct? thanks in advance, great thread

Had to ask for that myself.

General answer is no, you have to have an Admin password set.

The reasons vary and are not even all security related. It again differs between windows versions (the whole group policing) and may lead to weird behavior unfortunately.
There's a reason why MS still has standard users as Admin, it isn't so nicely implemented like with MacOS/Linux, so you have to go trough some uncomfort to achieve higher security.

lol i think i asked/said too much in my post...lemme simplify my question so i can understand your answer... should i use a pw for my admin acct?