My nephew (age 12) got into my administrator account, put on essentially all parental controls, and changed the password to something random that even he does not remember. I managed to create a brand new account but now wish to consolidate my photo’s and stick them in this new account. Is there a way to do this? Nobody knows what the old password currently is.
Sure.
As an Admin, you can do anything.
(OK, I guess the first question is - does your brand new account have admin privileges?)
Answer this first - the instructions for how to do what you want will depend on your answer.
I was amazed. Although I had to get root access to do so, my new administrator account did allow me to reset the master password, remove the parental controls, and do whatever I wanted with the other accounts. More power then I thought I would get. My question was based on the inaccurate opinion that I could not touch the other stuff.
Once again I am impressed by the power of the internet. I know nothing about programming but was just following step by step instructions. For the first time I also understand how computer viruses can do so much with such little lines of code. It was not hard at all for me to do what I needed to do.
I will sort of miss never seeing my nephew again, he of course has been banned from ever stepping foot in my area code for life.
Glad you got it figured out.
Your nephew scenario is one reason to have a guest account (or even your own account) use Standard privileges.
We did have a guest account. This was accessed through my account. He did all this when I left myself logged on when he was over. I did not think a relative would cause me trouble.
Don’t blame the kid–clearly neither of you were aware of the power of admin, but only one of you had the responsibility. You left yourself vulnerable all on your own. In the future, don’t let anyone have that power over your data–particularly yourself.
I’m not a Mac user so I don’t know the shortcut, but as a worker on (somewhat) sensitive materials at work I’ve gotten the muscle-memory to always, ALWAYS, hit Windows-L (lock workstation) as I get up from the keyboard. Good habit to get into.
I do it at home too, even though I live alone. But oh well.