04: Setup for Windows

The installation and setup instructions were created in Jul 2022 and are updated whenever there's a change that makes them incorrect. If you find that these instructions are wrong then please comment on this lesson and I'll fix whatever you find. Be sure to triple check that you are actually finding something wrong and aren't simply making a mistake.

Create Three Accounts

You are most likely used to running windows as Administrator, or a user with full administrator rights. I'm going to recommend that you stop doing this and instead configure 3 accounts:

1. One account named "administrator" that has administrator rights.
2. Your normal personal account, which you should already own, but reconfigure it to have no administrator rights.
3. A new "programmer" account that is nice and clean and is used when you're going through this book to keep your work life separate from your personal life. It should also not have administrator rights.

The purpose of this setup is partially security, and partially to keep you from destroying your computer. If you have a separate administrator account then any time you need to do something that requires administrator rights, Windows will prompt you for the administrator password. You'll still be able to run all of your software, but it will improve your personal and programmer account's security.

The security advantage of a separate administrator account comes from malicious virus software and hackers. Because you run as an administrator there is nothing stopping malicious software from fully owning and hacking your computer. When you run as a non-administrator account most of this software is stopped by Windows, making it safer. Some estimates are that 80-90% of windows attacks are stopped by this simple change.

The second purpose is to keep your programming activities from totally destroying your computer. When you run as administrator there are actions you can take which can cause damage, but if you run as a normal user then you can really only destroy your own account's files. This is why a non-personal work account is better since, if you do something stupid, then you only lose your code and not your entire life's work.