You work with your ETH user account without any administrative privileges. This is for security reasons and in order to protect your computer by preventing making changes that affect everyone who uses the computer, such as deleting files that are required for the computer to work or changing settings.

When you are logged in with a standard account, you can do almost anything, but if you want to do something that affects other users of the computer, such as installing software or changing security settings, you might be asked to provide a password for an administrator account.

In this case, enter the local administrator account “spadmin”. For Windows the prefix “.\” indicates the local account.

Normaly we give you the administrator account “spadmin” if you ask for this via http://gess-support.ethz.ch. The password should be different from any other password.