Administrator problems

I am the only user, therefore the administrator I guess.. but I (after recently doing a back-up of files) have now been unable to install programs after downloading ... and then am unable to delete the programs ... with error messages saying that I need Administrator permission to install/delete .. huh??? I am no computer geek.. just a regular user... I need to know in simple terms how to reset/eliminate/fix this problem.. I LOOKED into Administrator from the Control panel .. but after looking I was in no-way willing to risk screwing something else up because I didn't understand a darn thing I saw there...
HELP!! HELP !! :!:

 

Come on folks... I see where a few of you have peeked in to see what I am having a problem with... and yes, I am computer illiterate... and normally like it that way... but this administrator problem is interferring with my online experience,..LOL. Somebody has to have a simple suggestion I can use to get this dump netbook doing what it is suppose to do... I miss Win3.1 when ya could tell it to do something and it did it... Help !!! :cry:

 

XP requires that at least one User must be an Administrator, so one of your accounts is fully permitted to make those changes. It may be that at some time you set up a non-Administrator user account for logging in to XP, whenever you restart the computer, and that the basic Administrator account is not the account that appears when you boot the computer. In particular, you might have set up XP to boot right into a non-Administrator user account without a password screenthat reminds you that there is at least one other, full Administrator user account. If XP is set up to be "automatic" like that, you can easily forget there is a full Administrator account in addition to the one you always use.

Suggest you try Start Menu / Control Panel / User Accounts to see if there is more than one User, and go into the details to see which ones are full Administrator. That way you should see whether you have to log in with a different account with full Administrator permissions. If you want, you can give the account you currently boot up with all the administrator permissions.

Although lots of "security types" recommend limiting regular computer use to "non-Administrator" User accounts to protect against malware and viruses, I've found it too much a nuisance for practical purposes - precisely because I don't want to have to log into a different user account for every software update or configuration change - and would rather invest in good security software and be careful in my usage, than deal with the nuisance of logging off and on again to get Administrator permissions for routine changes to the system. Hope this helps.