To be or not to be... and administrator

I was reading a post by Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror, and it has caused me to think of me, and the 300,000 other people in this world who run as Administrator... it is wrong of us to do so. I have fixed my girlfriend's computer, her mom's, her family's and my family's with an Administrative account, and then everyone else has a limited user account, and not once has the computer fallen privy to a virus or other malware.

I run as admin, with my machine up-to-date with all the latest security patches from Microsoft, but I haven't been able to stop all attacks. I have been to less savory corners on the web, to get some less lawful biddings done, when out of nowhere buffer overflow, blue screen, and a restart later shows my computer almost crippled by spyware.

I do not believe in anti-virus or spy ware removal tools. I prefer a fresh hard drive, because no fix is more permanent than a fresh start. I have G4L (http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l), and a decent FTP Server (http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/), so occationally, all I really need is a fresh image to be brought down, and I then am running smooth.

But to capture the majority of your problems, become a limited user. On the occasion you need to install Office, Visual Studio, or some other suite you will most likely do in the beginning anyway, take the 1 minute to log out, log in as Administrator, and be done with it. Oh and if you can, turn off your Norton and McAfee, they do more harm than good.