Why You Use Xp's Limited And Power User Accounts


generalnmx

Playful/Fascist Mod
Joined
Apr 18, 2003
Messages
2,128
Age
42
Location
Maryland, USA
Website
www.matts-hosting.com
Trojans, Worms, etc. All of these types of malicious software affects your system and it's files. While running under a Limited (XP Home) or Power User (XP Pro) account will not totally prevent these softwares from effecting your system, they're a hell of a lot better then running as a Superuser! (aka "Administrator")

Setting up a Power User account is not as easy as setting up a Limited account, but it offers far more flexibility if you have XP Professional. Here's the the procedure:

- Go to Control Panel
- Go to Users
- Create a new account, name it whatever you wish with whatever priviledges you wish.
- Go to Administrative Settings
- Go to Computer Management
- Go to Users and Groups
- Select the new account you just made and remove all connections to other groups. Add the user to the Power Users group.

And you're done! It'll show up as "Unknown Account Type" in Users, but don't worry about that. The Power Users group has the ability to change everything but critical system files (basically everything in Windows\System and Windows\System32, probably more).

Now for the Limited accounts and on a far lesser degree Power User accounts, you will need Administrative-level access to programs which refuse to run on other accounts. The first trick you can try is installing the program in your My Documents folder - this works a good percentage of the time. For programs that totally refuse to run on non-Admin accounts, you can right-click and do "Run as..." for installations, but programs you use often you need a faster way. For that, here's a script I use daily:

http://www.tek-tips.com/gfaqs.cfm/lev2/4/l...id/329/fid/2760

Works fine. I checked the script and it doesn't try to connect to ads-galore.com or anything :D If you password-protect both accounts, you're not losing anything in security by using this script. (Note: I think you can pipe the password to Windows 2000 directly, but I know you can't do it in XP with runas.exe)

Now of course a more secure way is just installing Linux and ridding the world of yet another Windows user, but unfortunately not all people feel that way or have that opportunity ;)
 
Back
Top