Have you tried to log onto your Vista computer as local administrator? For your computer at home, you probably have only one user and are logged on automatically. If you add a second account, you’ll get the choice to choose when Vista starts up. But with no place to enter your user name, how can you log on as administrator. Well, without a little customization you just can’t.

To see the option to choose the administrator account for logon you’ll need to edit the registry. Run regedit and navigate to…

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon

Then add a new subkey named SpecialAccounts and in there add another subkey named UserList – now, in here, add a new DWORD value named Administrator and set its value to 1.

From a command prompt launched as administrator, you can use the Reg command to do this from the command line in one shot:

reg add "hklm\software\microsoft\windows nt\currentversion\winlogon\specialaccounts\userlist" /v Administrator /t REG_DWORD /d 1