Enable the (Hidden) Administrator Account in Windows Vista
Many people have asked me where on earth the Administrator account has gone in Windows Vista. Quite simply, it hasn’t gone anywhere, it still exists however, Microsoft made a very smart move as far as I’m concerned and disabled the Administrator account by default.
To be quite honest, the average home user and, dare I say, ‘power user’ shouldn’t need to enable this account for any reason what so ever. Those individuals who have already enabled the Administrator account and more importantly those who work exclusively with it are just asking for trouble and clearly have no idea about general system security.
If you have a genuine reason for enabling and working out of the administrator account, then please excuse my comment above as it doesn’t apply to you.
Enabling the Administrator Account
All warnings aside, if you still feel like being a cowboy, then here’s how you can enable and log in under the Administrator account.
First you’ll need to open a command prompt in administrator mode by right-clicking and choosing “Run as administrator” (or use the Ctrl+Shift+Enter shortcut from the search box in the Start menu).
Now type the following command:
You should see a message that the command completed successfully. Log out of Windows, and you’ll now see that you have a choice to log into the Administrator account.
There will be no password for this account. Once you are logged in as the Administrator, I strongly advise that you set one.
Disable the Administrator Account
Make sure you are logged in under your regular user account, and then open the command prompt in administrator mode (as above). Type the following command:
The administrator account will now be disabled, and shouldn’t show up on the login screen any more.
Reader Comments
[...] admin wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptMany people have asked me where on earth the Administrator account has gone in Windows Vista. Quite simply, it hasn’t gone anywhere, it still exists however, Microsoft made a very smart move as far as I’m concerned and disabled the … [...]
I followed what you said on what to do with the command promopt..but i get an error,it said access is denied.
can you help me on this?
Does the “access denied” error message appear when trying to open the command prompt or after you type in “net user administrator /active:yes” ?
yes..it appears after i hit enter.
and,one thing,i tried to look at control panel and see what i account i have.i found out that im using a guest account now which i didnt create.
and,i tried to look at my computer too. the memorydisk space i had before this thing happened is still the same. so it means i still have the files.
please help me… :((
and hey,i notice that i dont have the usual C:\users\AL on my cmd. instead,i have here C:\users\AL.AL-PC…
by the way,before these happened, i accidentally changed the SID on my computer,,.i tried to run the app back and change the SID prior to my old one,but nothing happened…
I’m assuming you are running Windows Vista, yes?
I’ve tested the method above on several Windows Vista computers all of which were successful.
One thing that may prevent this from working is if the computer has been joined to a corporate network/domain which employs group polices to prevent changes like this from being made. Even if the computer is no longer joined to that domain, some of these polices may still exist.
The Guest account in Windows Vista is turned off by default. So unless you or someone else has enabled this, I’m not sure how you have managed to log in as a guest.
I suggest you create a new account on the computer, log into that account, and disable the Guest account. The Guest account is very restrictive and this could be another reason why this command wont work.
That said, make sure that you right click on the Command Prompt icon and select “Run as administrator”. This should allow you to run the command regardless of who you are logged in as.
Hope this helps!
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[...] IT Resource wrote an interesting post today on Enable the (Hidden) Administrator Account in Windows VistaHere’s a quick excerptLog out of Windows, and you’ll now see that you have a choice to log into the Administrator account….Many people have asked me where on earth the Administrator account has gone in Windows Vista…. [...]