How to activate userid administrator

On a friends Windows 10 system, the command "net users" shows administrator and frank.
"net user administrator" shows Active: no
Frank has administrator privilege. The command "net user administrator /active:yes" yields:
System error 5 has occurred
Access is denied

So, how does frank activate userid administrator?

In Windows 10 it's Command Prompt (Admin). You can access it easily by right clicking on the start icon, or Win+X keys.

Thank you for the answers. I've never understood the relationship between having administration privilege and Run As Administrator, but now it's becoming clear.

Presumably, "Run as administrator" means literally what it says; you run with the privilege which the "Administrator" userid has, and that is more than Frank having the account type of administrator.

It was so satisfying to issue the command "net user administrator /active:yes" under my own userid on my own system, and have it fail, then to open a cmd prompt as Administrator, and see it work.

This still leaves me wondering how this all fits in with being a member of the group "Administrators", but I'll leave that for another day. I have a more interesting question to look forward to... tomorrow.

Swifty said:

This still leaves me wondering how this all fits in with being a member of the group "Administrators"...

Any account that is a member of the administrators group can run tasks with the highest privileges, but they have to choose to do so - they are subject to User Account Control (UAC) and by default run most things with standard user rights.

The Administrator account is different. It is not subject to UAC and will not get asked if it wants to use its admin privileges, it just does so without any checks. This is a very dangerous account to use for day-to-day browsing as malware would be able to run with the same rights as Administrator - ie. completely bypassing the UAC.

Enabling Administrator is useful for repairing a system, but for safety it should be set back to its default of 'disabled' when no longer needed. For safety you should use an administrator account for most things, not the Administrator.

Bree said:

Enabling Administrator is useful for repairing a system, but for safety it should be set back to its default of 'disabled' when no longer needed. For safety you should use an administrator account for most things, not the Administrator.

Thank you for the excellent description.
I'll be sure to disable the Administrator account as soon as we get to the bottom of Frank's problem... that he cannot save attachments into his Documents folder.
I've started a new post "Cannot save attachments" in General Suport.