Mac OS X forum: Passwords & OS X

Until I upgraded from a old G5 (on OS 10.5.8 and earlier OSs), to my new 2011 iMac now on Lion, when (clean) installing an OS I was asked to state whether I wanted to be an Administrator. (That status requires a password to log in and also to prevent others, such as kids, doing things which might upset the computer, including downloading.)

My iMac came with Snow Leopard already installed and I was surprised to find that I had to act as an administrator and enter my G5 password as described above, even to startup the machine. SL seems to require Admin. status by default. When I installed Lion the password was carried over along with the Administrator status. (A post on this forum said that Lion was clever in that way.) I still want to have that status so that's OK for me.

The point of this post is to mention that it appears that for some reason you also are an Administrator, and you might like to shed that and avoid the nuisance of entering a password at any time. But I do not know how you would do that in Lion. Perhaps someone else on this forum could help. (Having skipped SL until the iMac, perhaps I am out of date in this area.)

OS X requires that at least one (1) user of the computer be an Administrator. When there is only one user of the computer, then that account gets to be the Admin.

Without an Admin account, almost no software gets installed and a lot of other things don't happen.

There is nothing to stop you from creating a Non-Admin account as well as the Admin account and use that instead. Indeed, there are people who advocate this as a security measure.

Bottom line, All accounts should have passwords and OS X requires that one user be an admin.

P

I don't mind a password and think it's great for going on to your computer. My problem was anytime
I hit "Get Mail" I would have to do a password. Whenever I went on Safari a password etc.
But.....my problem has been solved......
mrmacfixit below.

I really appreciate your help. The link you sent solved my problem. Before this I had done the
keychain repair etc. but that didn't help. Resetting the whole keychain did.
Thank you again....I found it really annoying doing the password whenever I got more mail etc.