Is there any reason not to log in as administrator on Win2k every time?

[Mears]

Subject just about sums it up. I could understand not wanting to if you didn't want to risk altering or something, but it seems pointless not to.

 

[Muadib]

I agree with you, but I renamed the account.

 

[ArkAoss]

well if its your personal machine, i don't see why not, but at work, i loginto a workstation as admin, have access to a few extra drives on the server that we keep some apps that don't need liscencing to share, or like the SP's don't want some idiot putting in 3 over 6. or 6 on a 95 machine. at home, i oughta set it up so that my "other" nt drive can only be accessed by me or admin, thus i could allow a guest acct, and not risk problems.

 

[Castellan]

No reason you can't, but I always rename it and make another account in the admin group for several reasons, primarily because I like to have some extra security blankets in case I fry a profile or something.

 

[Ausm]

The reason I do not log in as administrator is because it will protect your machine from potentially harmful viruses.

Ausm

 

[Cyph3r]

How exactly will NOT loggin in as Administrator protect your machine from virii!? When you login as a user without Admin privaleges(on your personal machine, why wouldn't you give yourself admin priv's), you can still install programs into your local directory and execute them thus executing and spreading potential virii..Regards

 

[Noriaki]

I'll assume you mean your machine at home. Becuase if you mean a machine at work then it should be fairly obvious.

Maybe if you have pesky roommates that you don't want messing around with your computer? I never log onto my home PC with anything but admin. I heard once that if you use a "User" class ID for playing games, you get a bit more system resource free because there are less services running....I've never bothered though.

 

[CQuinn]

Cyph3r,

The virus cannot spread beyond the user space / user priveleges. So it can
have less of an impact on the system than if it had infected from the Administrator
level, which has access to everything on the system.

 

[HalfHuman]

In my experience, some games and dvd's will only run under power user. Most software installs either work for a power user, or allow you to run as administrator. For this reason you are just better off using power user on your home machine, if you are not playing with hardware settings constantly.

Just my $.02

 

Win2k's concept of administrator is not really analogous to the Unix concept of root. I can operate Linux as a plain vanilla user. I find it almost impossible to operate Win2k as anything but administrator.

 

[smoooooooooov]

How do you set up a non-Administrator account to log in locally to a w2k server? All i get with anything besides an Administrator account is soemthing about local policy not letting me log in interactively.

Any ideas?