silly question about admin

[Sussex Tech]

Hey all

Silly question but I wanted to check.

Am at one of the Schools I serve and a teacher has left me a message in the book that one of the students has accessed the admin account on the machines. I called in the student and asked him to show me what he did, and sure enough he did what I thought he did, log in locally to 'admin' with a blank password and accessed the local admin account. He's a bit of a whizz on the things so I have now created a password on each of the machines to stop him.

I was just wondering, is this password labelled 'admin' the administrator password that you are asked to configure after the installation of XP Pro or one that is created another way? Its just very unusual to find all the local admin passwords blank because I would of thought they would of had a password on them.

Thanks very much

[degsy]

You are correct.
Alot of systems builders don't bother putting in a password.
It could be for many reasons.

or because they'll forget it or they would have to pass that password on to the user who may want their own.


It could be that their version of Windows doesn't prompt for a password. I belive this can be the case with OEM installs, such as Dell.

I'll double check that later. I just installed a clean version of XP Pro last night.

[Sussex Tech]

Just spoke to my colleague who installed the machines orignally and he said he swore he put them on! So yeah they would usually be put on, but if you can find out that wold be great!

Thanks

[degsy]

A standard install of XP Pro does have the admin pass dialogue
http://www.blackviper.com/Articles/OS/InstallXPPro/images/image2_7.html


Though XP Home does not.
In addition, companies who may use preconfigured install disks or images may have a blank password as default.