The password on accounts is still important, even though you are the only
user on the PC. Without a password, anyone who can break-in and sit at the
computer has access to all of your private information such as bank account
information or any other private information on the PC.

Also, any malicious program that accesses the system can more easily use
your admin account.

The way you operated on XP is excellent. Use the same setup for Vista and
you will add even more layers of protection.

Hello,

I would personally recommend using an admin account for your situation.

Using a standard user account would involve a slight amount of extra work,
as it would require you to enter a password every time you wanted to perform
as an administrative action, as opposed to just being asked yes or no when
running as an administrator.

But, the reason why I suggest using an administrator account, is that some
programs may get confused between the two users on your system that you are
using.

When you perform an administrative action from a standard user account, you
are really using your other administrator account to do that operation, and
this can lead to some issues.

When you are using an administrator account, there is only one account
(although the protection is still there), and so you avoid these issues.

That being said, it is likely that it would be even more secure to use a a
standard user account *only* for non-admin things, and log out of that
standard user account and log in to an admin account in order to *only* do
admin things, and then never mixing the two (never entering your admin
password from your standard user account).