The SYSTEM account is used by the operating system and by services that run under Windows. There are many services and processes in the Windows operating system that need the capability to sign in internally, such as during a Windows installation. The SYSTEM account was designed for that purpose, and Windows manages the SYSTEM account’s user rights. It is an internal account that does not show up in User Manager, and it cannot be added to any groups.
On the other hand, the SYSTEM account does appear on an NTFS file system volume in File Manager in the Permissions portion of the Security menu. By default, the SYSTEM account is granted Full Control permissions to all files on an NTFS volume. Here the SYSTEM account has the same functional rights and permissions as the Administrator account.
Note To grant the account Administrators group file permissions does not implicitly give permission to the SYSTEM account. The SYSTEM account's permissions can be removed from a file, but we do not recommend removing them.
