Re: "Living" in admin account all day?

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

Doug Kanter wrote:
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?




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.


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Bruce Chambers

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