Advice on Windows XP user accounts

[Darkmatter]

I apologise now if this sounds like a daft question.

Are there any pros / cons of using the Administrator account for everyday use ?

Are there any differences between using a self made account with admin privileges over the standard Administrator account ?

[Jiff Lemon]

Having a seperate admin account is better because if anything happens to your account, you've an admin account to fall back on.

I'd strongly recommend renaming it though (and then create a guest account called administrator and disable it).

[p0lish]

Yeah..... get yourself another account and manually set the privilages. This will make things safer. At least that's how I use my XP. Besides my account I also have a general access and LAN share account - all with user specific privilages

This way nobody can screw me over except for myself.

[directhex]

XP by default has a hidden Administrator account to fall back on at all times - press ctrl-alt-del repeatedly from the welcome screen to give a classic logon prompt - username Administrator password was set during windows installation (or is blank for XP Home). This is the password you need when using the Recovery console.

The default XP login is AN administrator, but not the only one.

[Richie]

Yeah but that built in account can be renamed. It CANNOT be disabled fully but can be renamed to something else so its harder for ppl to crack.