User Account Management (Administrator & Standard User) - Free Online Tutorial

There are three different types of accounts to a computer: standard, administrator, and guest. You might wonder what’s the difference between them or what function is limited to each type. Let’s take a look at them one by one:

Administrator account:

As an administrator, you’re allowed to customize Windows freely; you can make any change to the computer: install or uninstall software and hardware you like, access to all files on the computer, and can also delete, or change other user accounts.

It seems like administrator user is the host of the computer, while others are guests. However, it’s more secure to operate the computer using a standard user account than administrator account. Why?

Standard account:

Using a standard account is more secure than using administrator account. Standard users can only customize their own user account, which means they can’t act on their own to make changes to the computer system, or security of the computer. Once they need to they have to ask for permission form an administrator first, and only with the password given by administrator can standard user do such operations.

As a standard account user you are allowed to use most of the capabilities of the computer, but can’t make changes to them, such as install or uninstall programs.

Guest account:

A guest account user can only use the computer temporarily, and can perform almost no customization. As a guest account user, you can’t make any changes to the computer or access any personal files on the computer. Unlike standard user account, no permissions can be given to guest user account to change any settings on the computer.

Why use a standard user account instead of an administrator account?

The standard account can help protect your computer by preventing users from making changes that affect everyone who uses the computer, such as deleting files that are required for the computer to work. We recommend creating a standard account for each user.

When you are logged on to Windows with a standard account, you can do almost anything that you can do with an administrator account, but if you want to do something that affects other users of the computer, such as installing software or changing security settings, Windows might ask you to provide a password for an administrator account.

How to create an user account?

To create ,remove or change an user account, you must be an administrator on your PC. To do so, right click on your My Computer icon and click "Manage". Or you can use the run command for opening computer management (compmgmt.msc).

Now go to "Local users and groups" which you can find at the left side of the computer management window. Then go to  users, now you can right click on any empty area to create an user account which will create a standard user account by default.

But, if you want to make it an administrator account, double click on the particular user name and go to the member of tab and click add button. Now type "administrators" in the box and click check names, then click OK. This procedure will add the particular user to the group called "Administrators". This gives the user account the administrative privileges.