[tightsocks]

If I understand correctly, the first user account created on a new system is called 501 and it is an Admin by default.

In order to keep my mom from accidentally messing up her system I would like to downgrade her account (501) to a non-admin and create a secondary account for admin purposes.

Questions:
1. Will making her 501 account into a non-admin cause the system to be confused?
2. Is is permissible to create a user account named, "admin" or is that name off limits?

This is on 10.4.3

Thanks for any info!

[Chuckit]

It should not do any harm to make 501 a normal account. You could delete the account entirely without causing trouble to the system — it has its own users for its stuff. As far as the system is concerned, user 501 is just a user account like any other.

EDIT: I thought at some point I tried to create an account called "admin" and it didn't work because there's already a group by that name, but apparently I'm thinking of something else.

[Raining Down in Texas]

I did exactly what you are thinking about when I first got my laptop two years ago without any adverse effects. My main working account is 501 and is a non-admin account, and I added a 502 that is an administrative account.

One of my coworkers created an account called "admin" without any problems.

[Millennium]

No problems at all. Only one account number is actually tied to any kind of admin ability, and that's number 0 (also sometimes known as root). Any other account can be adminned and de-adminned at will, and UID-0 works off of an entirely different system anyway, so technically you could "de-admin" it, though that wouldn't actually do anything.

[tightsocks]

Thanks for all of the info!