Russell Smith, the Editorial Director at Petri IT Knowledgebase, has over two decades of hands-on experience in IT, in both small business settings and government IT infrastructure projects. Russell started writing for Windows IT Pro Magazine in t...
In today’s easy Ask the Admin, I’ll show you how to add or remove a user account from the local Administrators group in Windows 7 and later operating systems.
Sometimes it’s not enough to elevate privileges in Windows, and there’s no option but to add an account to the local Administrators group. In this article, I’ll show you how to use the Local Users and Groups MMC snap-in to modify group membership in Windows.
The instructions below assume that you are currently logged in with a standard user account. If you’re already logged in as an administrator, you can skip elevating privileges when starting the management console.
In Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate, you can start a management console in the same way by typing mmc into the search box on the Start menu. In Windows 8, go to the Start screen, type mmc, and right click the entry in the results panel.
Now we need to add the Local Users and Groups snap-in to the console:
Follow the guide below to add a user to the local Administrators group:
If you want to remove a user from the Administrators group, check out the instructions below:
After making a change to the Administrators group, any users effected should log out so that the changes come into force.