Rename Administrator And Guest account with secpol.msc in Vista

10 January, 2008

By default the administrator and guest account are disabled for security reasons.

This makes it harder for hackers to hack into Vista and also it makes Vista run much more secure by default, for instance when surfing the internet with administrator account disabled and UAC enabled: Vista makes Internet Explorer run in user mode, while XP ran instantly in administrator mode. Running Internet Explorer in administrator mode means that sites are able to run bad programs on the fly without your permission, you can probably imagine this makes your PC very vulnerable.

But if you are running these accounts anyway, and would like to rename them, here is how to do it….

Click start and type secpol.msc

This will open up the Vista Security Policy Editor, now browse to Security Settings, Local Policy, Security Options

At the top double click for both the administrator and guest account, choose enabled. Close all windows and restart Windows Vista.

You are now able to login to Vista as administrator or guest. A good option is to Rename those accounts to make it harder for hackers/friends you don’t trust to find your precious login

After enabling these accounts you should set a password as well, click start then type in cmd, then type net user administrator “password” without the quotes of course, you can do the same with the guest account or any other accounts, for more info on net user type net user /? or net /?