Should I be logging in as an admin on my personal laptop?

I'm new to Win2k. I'm on a laptop with Win2k Pro installed. I've been logging in as the administrator but I recall a hearing that I should typically log in as a 'user' -- particularly when accessing the internet from this machine. It is a standalone (ie not connected to a server). Is there a good primer on how to be an administrator of one Win2k machine?
Generally, if you're the only person on that machine, it's probably alright to log in as an administrator. If you're worried about inadvertently damaging anything because you're logged in as an admin, the only way you can really do that is if you uninstall something you wanted to use in the first place -- and it's hard to do that by accident. For the most part, most of what goes with being an admin on a Win2K machine is much the same as being the main user of a Win98 machine -- defrag periodically, don't install anything you don't know about and clean out the temp directories often.

This was first published in August 2002

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