I have one admin account on my macbook air and want to change my account to normal. My account is managed by my company. The problem is that before I can just do it from my account but in El Capitan the box is grayed out even when the system preferences is not locked.
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How to make my account normal
- Thread starter anush2209
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You cannot demote yourself anymore in System Preferences while logged in, even when another administrator account is present. You can remove your administrator access with a Terminal command, but you will not be able to undo this from within the system if no other administrator account is present. The command is this:
The sudo utility will not be available to you anymore, the moment you enter the first command. To restore administrator access, you can promote the account again in System Preferences, or you can use the following command:
Code:
sudo dscl . -delete /Groups/admin GroupMembership your_user_nameThe sudo utility will not be available to you anymore, the moment you enter the first command. To restore administrator access, you can promote the account again in System Preferences, or you can use the following command:
Code:
sudo dscl . -append /Groups/admin GroupMembership your_user_name
That's interesting. But wouldn't you just log into the new administrator account to demote the other administrator while it's not logged in?
Yes, that is the regular way to do it. But it used to be possible, up to Mavericks at least, to demote yourself at any time, provided another administrator account is present. It is a bit annoying though if you just want to use the administrator account as-is without the bloat that is added to an account once you log in for the first time (the system creates all sorts of things for you then, keychains, caches and such).
Windows always allow a user to demote themselves when logged in. But promoting again requires another admin account to do so. A bit better than current Mac OS X .
Just the checkbox in System Preferences no longer works. You can make this change with Directory Utility also (in /System/Library/CoreServices) which provides the equivalent functionality of the dscl utility. I have no idea why they changed it. I do not generally like this kind of window dressing, when the functionality is definitely there.
I always have two account running all the time just in case their is a problem with my system and if I need to delete the account then I can and use the other account with no problems same apps and everything on both accounts
Much quicker way to have another account then to reformat your machine and does save a lot of time too
Much quicker way to have another account then to reformat your machine and does save a lot of time too
To be frank, I cannot imagine a situation in which that would help. If there is a problem with an account, and there are not that many things that can go wrong with accounts, then you can always create a new account or repair it. If there is a problem with the system however, then having two accounts is not going to help in any way. Reformatting the device is only necessary if the file-system or partitioning scheme is corrupted. System corruption can almost always be repaired from recovery or a bootable flash drive with OS X on it. You should always have a backup of the complete system in place. You don’t have to make it more complicated. ;-)