Thursday, 3 October 2013

Enable Hidden Administrator Account in Windows 8

One annoyance that I've seen in Windows 8 which I never before experienced in any of the previous ones was that the requirement of Administrator privileges is a rather strange process. You very well know that in Windows 8, the first account can be level upped to Administrator status just like in Windows 7 to get extra rights. However, in Windows 8, these rights aren't exactly enough to get pass to various processes.

However, this appeared more like a bug or a possible glitch to me rather than a 'meant to be' function. In Windows 7, when you level up the Local Account to administrator status, that's it. No more manipulation is needed. However, in Windows 8, there are moments when you get errors which are possibly related to the lack of these administrator privileges even though your account is of Administrator type. This is mostly due to denial of access to certain key areas like the temp folder where the program normally extracts its contents to start the installation or for some other tasks. What I've noticed was that the access of temp folder is reverted at random times and hence, access parameters needed to be added again to let your account use the folder.

Again, I don't know if its a bug or not but if you're one of those users, then you can get rid of these annoyances by simply activating the real Administrator account in Windows 8 which is hidden by default. Activation is easy -- just a command can enable/disable the Administrator account in Windows 8. This way, you can gain access to all the areas and get the real Administrator privileges without any obstructions.

Yes, this works for Windows 8.1 too.

Enabling Administrator account is like giving the key to all doors in the OS. So, its your duty to protect the rights. Make sure you set a strong password for your Administrator account as if other users get access to it, they can do literally anything they want. Thus, for safety, use Administrator accounts at the crucial times and it is better to disable it afterwards.

Procedure

Open Command Prompt from your current account. To do this, right click the lower-left corner of the screen (the Start button) and select Command Prompt (Admin). This will open the command prompt. Accept the UAC prompt if it appears.
Now, enter the following.

net user administrator /active:yes

Hit enter. You will get a note as "The command completed successfully."
Close the prompt and sign out of your account. You will see that an Administrator account appears at the sign-in screen.

If you want to disable the Administrator account, simply type the following command and it will again hide the account from your PC.

net user administrator /active:no

That was easy, right? I'll be posting more Windows 8 recipes in the coming days whenever I ran onto something cool and funky enough to share with.