Even if your Windows 7 or Vista user account is a member of the Administrators group, you are still asked to give applications permission to access your system in different ways. To enable the hidden Administrator account – and free of these hassles – simply follow these directions:
- In the search field of the Start menu, type “cmd” and right-click the cmd.exe suggestion that pops up in the results.
- Select “Run as administrator”.
- In the command prompt window, type (without the quotes) “net user administrator /active:yes”.
- Log out of Windows – voilà – the administrator account is now selectable.
Even if you consider yourself an advanced Windows user, beware that activating the Administrator account makes your system more vulnerable when you are logged in as this user. It’s the same as being logged in as the root user in Linux, in that applications will now get access to your file system like in Windows XP.