i’m the only one using the pc, so there is only one user - the administrator account. is this a bad idea? why?
Mildly bad, but not uncommon. The usual reason given for doing it is that many, perhaps most, programs assume they’re being installed by an administrator. This is partly laziness on the part of the software developers, but also partly caused by aspects of Windows’s design; things an installer routinely needs to do are often require non-standard privileges. Most users aren’t aware of, much less knowledgeable about, the other “levels” of access (Power User, etc). So it all becomes much easier to just install as administator.
The downsides are that you’re more susceptable to malicious programs. Viruses, worms, and the like can (generally) only access those things to which the user executing them (usually inadvertantly) has access. Hence, a non-administrator has less destructive ability (to write to %WINDIR%, for example), and hence a virus such a user executed also has less ability. But frankly, most worms and viruses on Windows spread by way of services like SQL or programs like Outlook, which already have admin-level access, anyway. Which is a long-winded way of saying that not running as administrator makes you safer, but not much.
A better (IMHO) reason for not doing it is that it’s pretty easy–by accident, design, or malicious code–to trash the login ability of an account. Not using administrator as the default login account means that you’ve got a fully-privileged backup account available to you to help fix problems when they occur. That said, it’s pretty common to give administrator access (remember, this is a privilege or access level that can be applied to any account, not just "Administrator) to the main login account too, because of the installation hassles mentioned above.
If you know enough to secure your system against the various threats, I don’t see much downside to running a second account that’s admin-enabled all the time. If you don’t know enough to secure your system, merely running as a default user won’t help much anyhow.
Note that this is very, very, very specific to SINGLE USER Windows. In Unix variants (including Linux and Mac OS X), you definitely don’t want to be running as “root” or superuser or whatever your OS calls it if you don’t have to – these systems are “better” (differently, anyway) designed, in order to have “basic user” access not be such a penalty, and root access is highly dangerous; a mistaken command can be catastrophic. Unix has the “sudo” command to temporarily grant root access when necessary, and Mac OS X has a similar gui-level “give me your password” sort of thing – both of these elegantly get around having to be root all the time just because the occasional command requires it.
Multiple-user Windows is similar; it’s too easy for one user to accidentally toast another with admin access – if you’re supporting multiple users, keep the Administrator account around, by all means, but don’t use it for day-to-day work.
thanks for the reply. since it doesn’t sound too bad i’ll keep things as they are, if only to avoid having to log in when i start the machine…