Windows XP Professional provides you with a number of
built-in local groups with specific privileges. When setting up stand-alone
systems or systems that will participate in peer-to-peer networks, you can
assign local user accounts to these groups in order to dictate how much control
users have when they’re working in the operating system.

In most cases, you assign user accounts to the Users group.
However, if you want to give certain users more control over the system, you can
assign those accounts to the Power Users group.

When the Power Users group doesn’t quite provide the
privileges that you want, it’s very easy to simply reassign the account to the
Administrators group and call it a day. However, that can be a dangerous
proposition in many situations.

A much wiser choice would be to add the user’s account to the
Backup Operators group, in addition to the Power Users group. The combination
of privileges from both of these local groups give the user account a broad
range of system administration capabilities, without giving access to all the
system resources to which the Administrators group has access. You can think of
the combination of these two groups as a “SubAdministrator”
group.

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