How to share a family PC without going crazy - Part 2: Creating accounts for each family member

By Ed Tittel

Print Story | Email Story
Add to My Digital Landing

Related Articles

• Building a Website: Adding a Shopping Cart
• Social Media Safety: Ten Best Practices
• Digital Landing Gift Cards
• Digital resolutions to start the New Year
• How to Perform Simple Maintenance Updates on your Mac

One of the reasons we recommend Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home or Professional, or any of the Vista versions is that all of those operating systems permit individual user accounts to be set up. They can also enforce access rules to the contents of a PC so that users can see and interact with their own files, and use shared or personal applications, but they can’t necessarily see and use other people’s files, nor use others’ personal applications.

Making this approach work requires that everybody agree to log into their own user accounts while using the machine, and that somebody be designated as the machine administrator to set up and manage the accounts. Though account passwords aren’t absolutely required, they’re recommended because they provide a modicum of privacy and security for all the users on a Windows machine.

When Windows 2000 Professional, XP Home or Professional, or Vista are set up, they provide mechanisms for defining and managing user accounts. The controls are available only to administrator-level accounts (by default, the first account set up is the administrator account, so be sure to give it a password and keep that information to yourself). Here, we’ll use Windows XP as the example operating system and the source of the screen shots we’ll show as we take you through this process step-by-step:

1. Log into the PC using the administrator account. Click Start, then click Control Panel.



2. In the “Pick a category” area, click on User Accounts.



3. In the “Pick a task” area, click on Create a new account.


4. A User Accounts wizard window will open. On the “Name the new account” page, type in a name for the target user (this can be a full name, a first name only, or a nickname: just pick something easy to recognize and remember), then click the next button.


5. On the “Pick an account type” page, click the radio button to the left of the “Limited” entry. This sets up private files for the user, and gives them only limited control over and access to the PC. There’s nothing wrong with having more than one administrative account, but all those with that level of power should be able to exercise responsibility and have some technical skills as well. Click the Create Account button to create the Windows Registry entries for the account, so it will show up on the login screen from here on out.


The User Accounts program in Control Panel also lets you associate an image with each account, and change the account name, password, or account type, and even delete an account. Get to know these controls by exploring this program and investigating its options (you’ll find a complete set of step-by-step screenshots and explanations on the Microsoft Web site in an article entitled “Create and customize user accounts”).
Once you’ve set things up, each user has a personal collection of files that shows up in Windows Explorer and other menus as “My Documents.” You can encourage family members to keep their personal files and information under that heading, and work with them to establish other personal directories and files as well, if necessary.

Now that you have your accounts setup, let's move on to how to enforce basic security measures.