You can also edit the sudoers file to give your user passwordless sudo. So you still have to explicitly sudo for admin access (unlike, say, just logging in as the root user) but don't have to type your password.

Granted, that's not n00b friendly or anything, but it is a pretty quick solution and you only have to do it once. Just make sure you have a real root login and/or use visudo to perform the edits to avoid accidentally locking yourself out of admin access if you screw up the syntax.