Vista Administrator Tip

Here’s a quick Vista tip: Make sure the built-in Administrator account is enabled with a password before you go and remove your normal login from the Administrators group.

I encountered this when I started seeing dialogs asking me to enter an Administrator password, but there was no text box to type in a password and the Okay button was disabled. That makes it difficult to type in a password and perform administrator functions, let me tell you.

This came about because I decided to run as a User instead of an Administrator, as Jeff Atwood so frequently advises at Coding Horror. Running as a User basically eliminates the need to run anti-virus software and spyware detectors, which bog down the computer’s performance. So I cheerfully went to my user settings and removed myself from the Administrator group.

Then I started getting the dysfunctional password dialogs. Weird. But no problem, I’ll just add myself back to the Administrators group.

Uh, except Users can’t do that. Oops.

Anyway, to fix it, you have to boot in Safe Mode (press F8 before the shiny round Windows logo appears). Then you’ll be able to login as the Administrator with no password (even though it’s technically disabled — go figure) and then you can either add yourself back to the Administrators group or enable the Administrator account with a password so you can run as a User.

UPDATE: On a Vista Home Premium installation, I had trouble enabling the Administrator account. I finally found that typing “net user administrator /active” into the Run… dialog (from an account with admin permission) will activate the Administrator account (source).

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