Thursday, July 8, 2010

Windows non-elevated administrators?

I've been reading this Wikipedia article on NTFS symbolic links, and it says:


The default security settings in Windows Vista disallow non-elevated administrators and all non-administrators from creating symbolic links.


But what is a "non-elevated administrator"? This is not a term I'm familiar with.

In my experience, an "administrator" on a Windows system is a user who is a member, directly or indirectly of the Administrators group.

But I wasn't familiar with the notion that administrators could be "elevated" or "non-elevated".

I must go do more searching, I guess.

2 comments:

  1. So in vista and after windows asks you when you wnat to do something with admin privileges. So maybe after you have been asked you are elevated.

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  2. It's a guess, but in Vista/7, even if you're a member of the Administrators group you still get the annoying dimmed screen and the "Are you really, really sure you know what you're doing?" box - by clicking 'Yes' on that I think you become "elevated" in order to do hardcore stuff like format a disk.

    Does seem to confuse the idea of a user account vs. an Administrator account.

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