Which one to choose? Update (Admin) or Update, Settings (Admin) or Settings?

Question

I am green on MikteX, and would like to have a try on this suprior tool.

Environment: Windows 8.1, ProteXt\MikteX 2.9.4533.

My Windows 8.1 has two accounts, namely the administrator account and the normal restricted account. I usually login into the restricted account as most of you for the sake of malware isolation.

When install MikteX (an option in ProteXt) fully (not the small basic version), I need to input the administrator passowrd. And then everything goes fine until I choose to update my Miktex as noted from the official site. I am now in my normal restricted account.

The problem is that when I switch to my Windows 8.1 metro, I found many duplicated menu items strucutured like this:

Maintenance (Admin)
|--Package Manager (Admin)
|--Settings (Admin)
|--Update (Admin)

Maintenance
|--Package Manager
|--Settings
|--Update

I insert the screenshot as reference for you:

I hope to maintain the two accounts' MikteX maintain consistent (especially the package upate or some core settings).

1. Which update or settings or package manager wizard should I use?
2. How can I smartly maintain the MikteX installed on my two Windows accounts?

Answer 1

MikTeX admin program are used to maintain a global (for all users) structure, while MikTeX non-admin programs are used to maintain each user structure.

If I'm not wrong, when you install MikTeX some default packages are installed for all users under an specific folder but it also creates particular folders for every declared user. These particular folders will be used to download packages on the fly, therefore this packages won't be available to other users.

If you allways make your tex work whith you user (non admin) account I'd suggest install miktex only for your user. This way you'll have only one folder structure to maintain and you won't see duplicated menu items.

But if you prefer (or need) to keep the duplicated structure, from time to time you can use MPM (admin) and install for everyone packages which where installed on the fly on a particular account. After that, use MPM to uninstall those packages from the user account.

You will also need to run Update (admin) and Update to update global and particular packages.