Windows 10: about its User Accounts...

In earlier version of Windows 10, I could access the folders for User's Temp and Windows Temp without problems, to dump the useless junk. After all, these are temporary files, and therefore not intended as "keepers". But in the latest version of Windows 10, I'm denied access to the Windows Temp folder. 

Yes, I have an Administrator account, and so do you. But it's an unelevated Administrator account, whatever the hell that means, and what it means is that it's useless for doing most of the things we expect to do with an Administrator account. Like access files denied to the regular user. For that, you need to activate a secret hidden Administrator account.

And if you do a search on Google for advice on how to do that, a lot of it will be useless information, either about previous versions, or giving you instructions that simply don't work. So here's what does work........

Open either of Command Prompt or Windows Powershell in what you thought was Admin mode, and at the cursor type as follows:-

net user administrator /active:yes

Press Enter

This will create that secret hidden Admin account, without a password. We are advised to have a password, so your next command sequence should be:-

net user administrator password /active:yes

Please note here that instead of the word "password" you should use your actual desired password, which will then be activated after you again press Enter.

And now for the bad news: when I did all that, and used my new Administrator login choice on the login window, I got a whole new screen re-configuring Windows and telling me "This won't take long" and "This is taking a little longer than expected..." and then it left me there to die for maybe twenty minutes, until I got impatient and punched Ctrl-Alt-Del to bring up a fresh logon screen. In that, I did get logged onto that new Admin account, only to discover that the Windows it presented to me was a very minimal bare-bones undressed version without any of my usual customizations such as gadgets, taskbar icons, etc. and it then took me additional time to get some of that restored to this weird version. After that, I could access that formerly denied folder Windows Temp, and clean it out.

Then I did a restart, and logged back on as the regular account, with all of my usual customizations thankfully still there. And I don't understand why Microsoft has to make all this so complicated. It reminded me of Windows Vista, which most of us hated with a passion and couldn't wait to replace. So today's Question Everything would have to be: "Why doesn't Microsoft remember its past mistakes, and try harder to avoid those in future?"  

 

And guess what? I don't have those problems in Windows 7. And there's a lesson here if we look for it. Maybe this is why Windows 7 is so popular.