Most of you might have noticed that ye good ol’ administrator account is not available anymore in newer Windows versions. Actually it is hidden and disabled for all versions since Windows Vista. And under normal circumstances you actually don’t want to use this account anymore. But there are some use cases where you want to have this administrative access.
So, lets take a look at it. As mentioned before, the account exists. That means it just needs to be activated. Now, this can’t be done within the UI. You have to dive into the command prompt that runs as administrator. Kinda confusing to activate the administrator with a command prompt that runs as administrator, isn’t it?
Lets get started. First you need the command prompt with elevated (administrator) rights. On Windows Vista and 7 you can simply search for “command prompt” in the start menu and select “Run as administrator after right-clicking on the menu entry. Or you can use the Ctrl-Shift-Enter shortcut inside the search box.
On Windows 8.x you right-click the start button and choose the menu option “Command Prompt (Admin)”.
Now we have a command prompt and with the following command you activate the administrator account:
net user administrator /active:yes
It is important to know that this user does not have a password set at all. So everybody can log in as administrator! If you don’t want that, and usually nobody wants that, you have to set a password. This can be done with the following command on the already open command prompt:
net user administrator
If you are done with your task or you want to deactivate the administrator in general, you simply use the following command:
net user administrator /active:no
And now happy administrating! Or in other words, creating a lot of Foo.