Lost Administrator Rights in Windows 10/11? Regain Admin Rights

UAC Yes Button Missing

Summary: This article tells you how to restore your user account’s lost administrator rights and privileges in Windows 10 and 11.

This article discusses the “lost administrator rights” issue caused by tampered user account group membership. Like the ‘lost password’ scenario, losing your account’s administrator rights & privileges is an awkward lock-out situation where the user can’t run anything that requires elevation.

If your user account has lost admin rights, it may have been caused by malware. Or you may have inadvertently set yourself a “Standard User” via Account settings or incorrectly configured the Local Security Policy or user account group membership.

This means you can’t return to the User Account settings page and set yourself as administrator. In such cases, the Yes button in the UAC dialog will be missing or grayed out.

UAC Yes Button Missing

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How to Edit the Registry Offline Using Windows Recovery Environment

windows re bcdedit osdevice

Sometimes, you may need to edit the Windows registry offline to rectify a situation where Windows doesn’t boot after modifying some settings recently. Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) is a handy platform that provides various system recovery options to diagnose and repair an unbootable Windows installation.
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How to Delete All Your Microsoft Edge Favorites?

recover or undelete edge favorites

This post tells you how to delete all the bookmarks or favorites in the Microsoft Edge web browser.

Instructions for Microsoft Edge (Chromium) browser

In the new Microsoft Edge (Chromium) browser, here is how to delete your entire bookmarks/favorites:

Method 1:

  1. Open Microsoft Edge
  2. Click on the “Settings and More” icon (the icon showing three dots), click Favorites, Manage Favorites.
    (Alternatively, you can launch the address edge://favorites/ directly to open the Manage Favorites dialog.)
  3. Click on an item in the right panel to set the focus on it.
  4. Press Ctrl+A keys to select all bookmarks.
  5. Click on the Delete button that appears above.

Method 2:

  1. Open Microsoft Edge and open the following link:
    edge://version/
  2. Note down the Profile path. For example, it may be something like:
    C:\Users\ramesh\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Edge\User Data\Default
  3. Close all instances of Microsoft Edge
  4. Open the profile path in File Explorer
  5. Delete or rename the file named Bookmarks. This file contains your entire favorites.

This removes all the bookmarks (for that particular profile) in Microsoft Edge Chromium.

Instructions for the old Microsoft Edge browser

The old Microsoft Edge browser doesn’t provide an option to bulk delete favorites, but you can clear all your favorites by deleting the spartan.edb file in Edge’s store folder for your user profile. Here is how to do that.Read more

Windows 10 Start Menu User Folders Do Not Open When Clicked

When you click Start and click on a shortcut to your personal folders such as Documents, Downloads, Pictures or Music, nothing may happen. This problem occurs if the shortcuts in the Start Menu Places folder are missing or have been tampered with. The shortcuts in Start Menu Places are common to all user accounts, and not meant to be modified by users.

(Update: Information in this article doesn’t apply to Windows 10 v1809 and higher. Start Menu Places folder is no longer used in v1809 and up.)

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Restore Missing Media Feature Pack/WMP in Windows 10 and 11

spring creators update error 0x800F081E wmp

After buying a brand new Windows 10 or 11 computer, double-clicking a video file opens it in Films & TV (or Movies & TV), and the Windows Media Player shortcut is nowhere to be seen. This makes one wonder if Windows Media Player has been removed in Windows 10 and 11. Windows Media Player very much exists in Windows 10 and Windows 11.Read more