MS Windows Administrator meets Dragon

I started getting very annoying messages every time I went to open MS Office programmes. I would get a message stating "Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer" error message (message shown alongside). So I did a bit of hunting, and found that this was an administrator error. If I set my user account as the administrator account, this problem would go away (Chacos, 8 August 2013).

Excellent. I did this, and indeed the message error with opening MS Office apps did go away.

Until I wanted to use Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which would not launch. I kept getting an error message stating "Dragon NaturallySpeaking should not be run in elevated mode", which made no sense whatsoever to me. But, thanks to Google, a search on the error text string found that this error occurs because you cannot run this software in Administrator mode (Nuance Customer Help, 30 March 2018; see message at top left of page). R-i-g-h-t.

So I either have to put up with ANNOYING Microsoft messages every time I launch a piece of software, or I can't run Dragon. An interesting conundrum <sigh>.

The next step was to UNDO Administrator mode, and this is where I ran into a different and unexpected problem. Undoing Administrator mode turned out to be not as simple as starting it. I found some instructions (thanks to Lawrence Abrams, 14 April 2010), and thought I would repeat them here with all the links in case anyone strikes this particular collection of MS entertainment in future!


The steps to turn off Administrator user mode in Windows 7 & 8 are:

• Either Start | Computer | right-click on the Computer label | select Manage; or Desktop | Computer icon | right-click and select Manage:
  
• In the Computer Management window, click on System Tools | Local Users and Groups | Users (NB: if prompted by a "User Account Control" screen, click on the 'Yes' button). Double click on users so you can see all the accounts on the machine.
• Select the Administrator account | Right-click and select Properties
• The Administrator Properties window will open. Untick the "Account is disabled" option to enable the Administrator account (or tick to disable).
  
• Click OK.
• Restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

Easy once you know how... and have documented the process!


Sam

References:

• Chacos, B.(8 August 2013). How to fix your PC's worst annoyances. Retrieved from https://www.pcworld.com/article/2046046/how-to-fix-your-pcs-worst-annoyances.html
• Lawrence, A. (14 April 2010). How to enable and disable the Windows Administrator account. Retrieved from https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/enable-disable-windows-administrator-account/
• Nuance Customer Help (30 March 2018). “Dragon NaturallySpeaking should not be run in elevated mode” error message. Retrieved from http://nuance.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5351/kw/Dragon%20NaturallySpeaking%20should%20not%20run%20in%20elevated%20mode