What differences are there between built-in Administrator and other Administrators?

Question

Are there any significant differences in the rights, privileges, permissions, or other powers held by the built-in Administrator account, and those held by non-built-in Administrator accounts?

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited May 17 '11 at 17:34

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Some applications are incorectly coded to look for the SID of the well known Administrator account. This was an issue in the early days of NT4 but don't think it's an issue now...

I don't think any applications match on the name "Administrator" since that is Engish specific and is a very poor programming practice. "Administrateur" and other language matches would have to be accounted for.

Instead applications should match on the SID of the local group Administrators

edited May 17 '11 at 17:34

Iszi

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answered May 17 '11 at 17:13

makerofthings7

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Actually, I did have a rather large well known vendor in the IT operations space that checked permissions against the "Administrators" group - i.e. checked the name of the group. Strangely none of the QA processes found this, until I reviewed the authorization code and found it... and this was only a couple years ago. – AviD May 17 '11 at 22:37

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered May 17 '11 at 17:29

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The only difference is that the built-in administrator account SID is well known. This makes for bad programming logic by 3rd parties, but otherwise that is the only difference.

answered May 17 '11 at 17:29

Steve

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score 1 · Answer 3 · answered May 24 '11 at 14:33

One small difference, is when a folder is created by any administrator, the default owner for that folder is the Administrators group.
This is not so much a difference between administrators and Administrator, but a possible effect that might possibly have other consequences.

Also note that this default is configurable, and anyway it is no longer supported by Vista/7/2008.

What differences are there between built-in Administrator and other Administrators?

3 Answers3