Kevin Sullivan of DesktopStandard says creating a non-administrator account protects us from many of the stupid things we do. "The opportunity for me to make inadvertent mistakes running as an administrator is huge."

Kevin says when you're Logged on as an administrator, you can do anything - download, change hardware, change files. But the same goes for a virus that slips into a system.

He took me through a demo. Logged on as administrator, he clicked on a virus. It replicated itself – to every single directory in the system.

Logged on as a regular or limited user – “click” - nothing happened. The virus couldn’t execute anything.

It's easy to create a user account. Under control panel, click on user accounts and follow the instructions. We created one for me – typical user - not an administrator. That limits what I can do, but also limits harm from bad things.

If I’m hit by a virus or other kinds of attacks when I’m logged on with my limited user account – what happens?

(IJ): We have stuff out there that tries to turn off your anti-virus. KEVIN: “Can't do it. (IJ): Turn off anti-spyware. KEVIN: “Can't do it.” (IJ): Write files to the system… Kevin: “Absolutely not.”

The user account may not be for everyone.

Tom Blanford heads TRB Consulting of Waldorf, MD, which does security for small businesses. Blanford says non-administrator accounts make a lot of sense, but some people won’t like some of the limits. "There's a lot of games that you cannot run as a guest, there's a lot of common applications that will not run. Quicken is one, the Palm software for your handheld won't run as a guest, generally. There are some ways around them.”

One way is to switch between user and administrator accounts in Windows XP. Surf as a user; make changes, download as an administrator.

Amy Roberts of Microsoft says the new Windows Vista coming out next year will make it easier to tweak what regular users can do without switching to an administrator account. "Some of the work we're doing in Windows Vista around the user account is be able to make it so that you don't have to have administrator rights for a simple task like resetting the clock on your PC, for example."

You may not want to switch back and forth, but if you have other family members you want to keep from downloading stuff, a limited account could be the answer.