Page 887 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

See and manipulate any file on the machine.

Install new desktop programs (and certain hardware
components).

Note

You don’t need to be an administrator to install a Microsoft Store app, though.

Standard accounts

There’s another kind of account, too, for people who don’t have to make
those kinds of changes: the standard account.

Now, for years, people doled out administrator accounts pretty freely. You

know: The parents got administrator accounts, the kids got standard ones.
The trouble is, an administrator account is a kind of security hole. Anytime
you’re signed in with this kind of account, any nasty software you may
have caught from the internet is also, in effect, signed in—and can make

changes to important underlying settings on your PC, just the way a human
administrator can.

Put another way: A virus you’ve downloaded while running a standard

account will have a much harder time infecting the rest of the machine than
one you downloaded while using an administrator account.

Today, therefore, Microsoft recommends that everyone use standard

accounts—even you, the wise master and owner of the computer!

So how are you supposed to make important Settings changes, install new
programs, and so on?

That’s gotten a lot easier. Using a standard account no longer means you
can’t make important changes. In fact, you can do just about everything on
the PC that an administrator account holder can—if you know the password

of a true administrator account.