Admin authorization required when I AM the admin. Help?

I just got my new computer yesterday (complete with Vista, which I have
no experience with) and at one point I was downloading some zip files
that were to be extracted into folders specified by myself; I did this
all the time on my old computer. But when I try to do it now, an error
message comes up telling me that that action requires an administrative
authorization..........but there's only one user account and I am the
administrator. It also gave no prompt for me to accept it; it just
denied its use.

I read that there's some new security feature with Vista called UAC (I
believe?) that treats every user as a standard user, and that ever .exe
file is supposed to have some authorization thing with it..........I
don't know much about computers and I JUST wanna be able to turn this
off or know how to deal with it. Any help is GREATLY appreciated.




--
Joel Goetz