bluefacedpixie

Pretty good article that’s simpler and not too far off my own process.

If you are buying or setting up a new Mac, go for it.

If you read the comments the whole “administrator” account is explained in a confusing way. Basically you should have two accounts: your everyday account and an administrator account – often called admin. How to set this up depends on whether you’ve had your computer for a while.

If you have a new computer

1. Name the default user ‘admin’, leave this user as the administrator.
2. Make a new “standard” user – that’s you (my account is called gordon)
3. Use the standard account.

If you’ve used your computer for some time

1. There is a good chance this user (your default user) has all your files and stuff, so you want to keep it as your everyday account – this user is also an admin so you need to do a shell-game to fix this
2. Create a new admin user – ‘admin’.
3. Logout of your normal account
4. Login, just this once, into your ‘admin’ account
5. Now change your old account (the everyday one) to be “standard”. i.e. take the administrator rights away.
6. Logout of admin.
7. Log back into your everyday account

Once you’ve done this…

You never need to log into the admin account again. Use your standard account for everything. The only time you need to know about admin is when software asks you to authenticate – at that time you need to enter the username (admin) and the password (you did set a good password, right?). This is a good time for you to think about whether you trust that software, or want to install it etc.

Caveat

If you know all this then you probably don’t need to follow any of these hints.