Use the Administrator account by default in Win7 and Vista

Are you annoyed by all the restrictions Vista and Windows 7 places on the default user?  Your user privileges are restricted which can result in unexplained errors when you try and do things unless you figure out that it’s all to do with your user rights.  In a business environment this may be the intention (to control what users do) but at home you would normally want to do whatever you want.

Using Administrator privileges, however, can be risky based on your PC knowledge because you will be allowed to do anything you want, including mess things up by mistake!  Before continuing, make sure you are happy with having 'god mode' on your PC and that you, or anyone else, is not liable to go doing things that would adversely affect your PC.
[step=""][Ed. Note:] Also, if you are ever hit by a virus or other malware, that code will run with full administrative privileges; it gets to run in 'god mode.'  It can install device drivers, usurp system-critical functions, write anything it wants anywhere in the registry, send emails containing your banking logon information to someplace in Russia... In short, it can kill your computer, laughing at you as it does so.  So consider this a friendly "head's up!"
[/step]
Here is how to enable the Administrator account, set it to automatically login as Administrator and then remove your original user account if not needed.

1

Open your start menu and in the ‘Start Search’ box at the bottom type “Command Prompt”.  You should see the command prompt at the top of the start menu.  Right click and choose ‘Run as Administrator’.  The command window will appear with “Administrator: Command Prompt” in the title bar.

2

Activate the administrator account by typing:

net users Administrator  /active:yes

Select all Open in new window

exactly as shown, i.e. capital A, spaces etc.  Hit enter and you should see "The command completed successfully."

3

Logoff and you should now see ‘Administrator’ login as an option.  Choose to login to Administrator (this may take a while because logging in for the first time under any user will go about creating your documents folders.  You should now see ‘Administrator’ as your documents folder name (top right of the start menu under the picture).

4

Now set Administrator as the default Windows user.  Bring up the Run window by holding the Windows Key and press R.  Type
     control userpasswords2
and hit OK.  This should open the ‘User Accounts’ window.  To bypass the login screen uncheck the box that says “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer.”  Now a window titled “Automatically Log On” will appear allowing you to specify credentials so windows can login automatically.  The user name should already have ‘Administrator’ and you can leave the password boxes blank if you haven’t set one up since enabling it.

NOTE: if you want to set a password for the Administrator account to use you can go
    Start > Control Panel > User Accounts > ‘Create a password for your account’.  
This should be entered on the ‘Automatically Log On’ dialog box above so auto-logon can take place.

WARNING: if you remove your old account, your documents folder associated with it will go as well!  Make sure you move everything you want to keep over to the Administrators documents folder.

5

If you’re now only going to use the administrator login, you may want to remove your old redundant login account to restore hard drive space.  Go into ‘User Accounts’ same as above but choose ‘Manage another account’, click on your old account and choose ‘Delete the account’ from the left.  Here you can choose to keep or delete the users files (make sure you backup what you want to keep) then hit ‘Delete Account’.

That’s it!  No more access denied messages; when you boot up, Windows will bypass the login screen and automatically start you as the Administrator.