i installed feisty fawn this past summer and im just now finding out after it crashed im not administrator.
in most of the instructions there were online to get my computer back up the command apt-get update was used. and every time it said something about access denied because of me not being admin.

any idea how i could fix this without losing everything stored on my computer?

sudo apt-get update. Ubuntu uses sudo to help with permission controls instead of creating a root admin user. You can enable root. Checkout the Ubuntu Guide.

This is done for system security reasons. Unlike Windows, Linux distros are typically run as a normal user with limited permissions for enhanced security. You have to manually su to root (Admin) in order to perform activities on the core system. This is a very good practice and you should only run as root when performing such activities and run as a limited user the rest of the time.

Just to elaborate a little, consider the formatting of your hard disk... This operation should only be possible for the owner of the machine - the administrator.

Now we all know that security problems in application such as web browsers might lead to an attacker being able to run some program from the compromised web browser process... If the user who runs the hijacked browser has admin privileges then can do all sort of mischief to the computer which runs the process.

However, if the user who runs the process is not allowed to do these things, the compromised process cannot do it either.

Of course this is only one small part of security, and is not a magic bullet. It's a start though.