Lost administrative privileges

I really did a stupid thing and I don’t know what to do. I was given a Dell 8400 series with Windows XP Home Addition operating system by a friend who upgraded to a laptop. Naturally his name was referenced throughout the system. I thought that by replacing my name wherever his was would take care of the change. It looked like changing the names worked in 95% of the cases. But when it came to changing the administer name, that’s when I really loused up, I blatantly deleted his name thinking I could replace it with mine. I couldn’t find any way to set up my name as administrator, and now when I try to do certain operations it keeps giving me an error message that says I don’t have administrative privileges. Is there any way that I can get my name to have administrative privileges?

 

rgeleh,

XP has a hidden administrator account, log in using that.

See How to login as Administrator in Windows XP

To deal with your naming issue you should really have copied the profile rather than messing with user names, see

How to copy data from a corrupted user profile to a new profile in Windows XP

Don't let the word corrupt scare you, the technique works equally well with non corrupt profiles.