Administrator on XP home has limited access !

[Alister]

A wierd problem. For the first time, I started windows in safe mode to get access to the administrator account, fine no problem and there was a blank password that I changed. When starting windows in normal mode, at the logon screen, I should be able to press ctrl-alt-del twice to get to log on as administrator, which I get, but when I enter "administrator" as login and then the password, it says that I have limited access!
From within windows, if I use the "Run as" to run a program as administrator, I get the same message! My administrator account is actually useless.

[sia]

There are many options in administrative tools. A power user can change them. There maybe an option for this in local security policy.

[Alister]

There are many options in administrative tools. A power user can change them. There maybe an option for this in local security policy.

Can you be a little bit more specific? This doesn't help me.

As far as I know, XP home does not have power users.

[sia]

I think you can't actually log on as administrator. What is the exact message of windows when you log on as administrator?

[Alister]

There is no message. Starting in safe mode, at the welcome screen, I get to logon as either "Administrator" or into my own account which has also administrative rights. On this second account, there are no limitations! But I did not create the "Administrator" account and this should be the real administrator account.

[madad2005]

Yes, you can log-in as administrator in XP home. When you first install home, the very first account is the administrator account with all admin priviligies, it just lacks most of the fancy tweaking/security options available in the Pro version.

Just because the log-in name is administrator, doesn't necessarily mean you will have the full admin priviliges! I have a few admin/ root user accounts and my log-in is most certainly not 'administrator' - any hacker has already won half the battle to get access to your entire pc. I personally have never heard of an 'administrator' username log-in working in XP and if there is one, I am glad it only has limited access.

Dunno if this has helped at all.

[sia]

There is a default accoun,t named administrator in XP pro that gives user full access.
I don't know about home, I've never used it.

[Alister]

It certainly did not help!
As I mentioned, I did not create the "administrator" account myself. It was created by XP and therefore I expect it to have full administrative rights. Of course I can change the login name later. The question is why it does not have full rights and how I can grant full rights to it.

[Erik]

As mentioned it is possible to change the rights of any account. It would be easy enough to create an account named Administrator, which has very limited rights, and an account named Limited, which has adminitrative rights.

Is this the same HP computer you mentioned in other posts? Did it come with XP already installed? If so it is possible that when it was installed the company took away power from the Administrator account with no password for security reasons. Better to have an account the whole world knows about, with no password, but that has no rights. If you have a working account with Admin rights I wouldn't worry to greatly about it unless you experience other virus like activity.