Trouble signing on as THE Administrator on 5308?

Those of you who have hurriedly downloaded the Windows Vista Feb CTP (build 5308) may have noticed something sinister: unless you join a domain, it is awfully difficult to logon to the built in Administrator account.

To work around this using AutoLogon:

1. Logon as the account you created during the installation.
2. From the Start menu, go to "All Programs", "Accessories"
3. Right-click on "Command Prompt" and choose "Run as Administrator"
4. Click "Allow" from the ConsentUI prompt
5. In the resulting Command window, enter "regedit" and press enter
6. In regedit, browse to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon
7. In the Winlogon key, create a new value of type REG_SZ (string) titled AutoAdminLogon and set the value to 1.
8. Also create a string value titled "DefaultPassword" and set it to the password you want for the Administrator account.
9. In the value "DefaultDomainName" enter the name of your computer
10. In the value "DefaultUserName" enter "Administrator"
11. Close regedit
12. Back in the command prompt, enter "Net User Administrator password*" (replace password with the password you entered for DefaultPassword).
13. Log off or reboot. You are now logged on with the local Administrator account. To stop it from auto logging on, remove that "AutoAdminLogon" value or set it to 0.

To work around this using a registry hack (the same one that works for enabling the Administrator account on XP Home):

(Thanks to Ed LaLonde for calling my attention to this trick.)

For those of you who join your computer to a domain, you can easily logon as the local administrator account using Switch User.

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