Do you think this actually makes your Mac more secure?

I don’t personally do it but it isn’t a bad idea. If a piece of malware were to get onto your computer and try to install itself or access certain critical parts of the system, it would not have the access to do so because of it not being and administrator account. Even if you do use an administrator account though, the most critical parts of the system still require you to enter a password before they are modified.

It’s really really easy to do this, so there’s not much cost involved (except that if you call Apple tech support, they will assume that you are running as admin, which led to some confusion on a support call I made). I used to do this.

If malware has access to your system, it will be able to delete and/or corrupt the documents folder even if I’m not admin. And that would be just as bad, for me.

I do like the recommendation that you should keep financial documents or other private documents in an encrypted disk image.

Its not a bad idea, but I don’t personally do it because its just that much more of a hassle for me.

Just be aware of what you’ve downloaded. There’s so few viruses on the Mac and they all require you to type your administrator password in for them to get to work. You can keep yourself safe by just knowing what’s asked for your password and thinking before you go ahead and type it in.

If you worry that you may accidently authenticate something which you shouldn’t, then my all means create a separate account with a different password. The virus will still ask for the admin password – it’ll just be different to your new user password (unless you set them as the same in which case it really is pointless). It doesn’t make your Mac any more secure, it just makes Human error slightly less likely.

I hate it, but it’s true. It is Safer and Intelligent to do that. I’ve been there… and still don’t doit. I wish I stop wondering about it and get use to create that other account… well, I recomend it but I don’t doit as other many stuff I do.

Echoing what user damien says, be especially cautious when any pop-ups appear that say your plug-ins are out of date (FlipFor Mac WMV for example); never update your plug-ins that way; always close or cancel that operation, then go to the website of the maker of that plug-in and check for updates direct from their website.

I did it, and it was extraordinarily easy.

Now when I need admin privileges, I have to type a username and password instead of just a password. Not too inconvenient.