The Security Mentor

Suppose you've followed my advice, and you log in to your Windows system without Administrator rights.

Sooner or later, probably sooner, you'll find something that doesn't run right. When you're logged in as a normal user rather than an Administrator, all your normal activities should work in a correctly written program. There's a lot of badly written software out there. There's no excuse for a typing tutor program to need Administrator powers simply to run, but it does.

You'll appreciate shift-right-clicking when that happens. It lets you temporarily promote yourself to Administrator. If you mouse over the icon or menu item to run a program, hold down the shift key, and press the right mouse button instead of the left, you'll see a menu pop up. Near the top of the menu, there's an item called "Run As ...". Click it. You'll see a dialog with the choice "Run the program as the following user". Type in the username and password for your administrator account, and click OK. Then you're running the program you started as if you had logged in as an administrator. When you close the program, you're back to normal.