XP User Accounts

Happy Holidays everyone. I was a good boy this year and Santa says a new computer will be arriving this week. It is a Dell 8400 with XP Pro. Have been using Win 98 and am not too familiar with XP. I would like to know how to set up user accounts and what their uses are. Any other advice will be greatly appreciated. Thanks all........Mike

 

mtwilco, In XP you can set up user accounts by going to Control Panel > User Accounts. Follow the screen directions listed there.

User Accounts can work to conceal one users personal settings from others. A different secret password is used for each user. Each user will have a separate personal Desktop with their own icons. They will also have their own My Documents folder. You can set each users rights and restrictions. That's often done to guard against children damaging the system. You can install software and choose which users to make it available to. Those are some of the main reasons to use different accounts for each user.

Good luck with the new system. XP is great and quite robust as compared to the previous ones. You'll like it once you get beyond the "New" mysterious system stage. I'd say you have resisted long enough.

 

user accounts

Thanks surferdude. My present system is set up on three 20gig partitions. Win 98 is set up on all. One is for me, one for my wife and one to experiment on. I guess what I need to know is how to set up the accounts. My wife and I will be the only people using this computer. I understand that you should not run in administater mode. But I will be the one who maintains the computer. My wife wants her own desktop settings,email programs and will download and install a few programs. Any guidance on this will be a bigs help. Thank you for the help...........Mike

 

Set up new accounts for yourself and for your wife and make both accounts part of the administrators group. Then for normal PC use, log on with the new accounts.

I'd suggest setting a strong password on the administrator account so
- at least 8 characters
- not a word
- use both alpha and numeric characters
- use a combination of upper and lower case characters

For instance
no*cRack7thIs

Some malware will try to sneak in via the Administrator account since it's normally present and many folks leave it wide open. With a password meeting the above, a brute force attempt to crack the password would take many hours and so be very unlikely to succeed.

Probably a good idea to write it down and keep it handy though since you aren't worried about anyone at home.

 

User Groups

Thank you newt. That clears it up for me. I'm sure I'll be back shortly with more XP questions. Happy Holidays..........Mike

 

Mike - the move from 9X directly to XP always causes questions and confusion. Well worth climbing the learning curve again though.