Why everyone should have a second user account on their computer

Thushara Samaraweera
5 min readNov 18, 2020

“ How do you protect your personal data, if you’re not the only person using your PC. Do you put passwords each file? I know it is very impractical. “

If not,

“ you want to increase the security of your PC. ”

Welcome readers! Today I am going to talk about what are advantages of creating limited user accounts on your computer. Many people do not know how much is it important as well as how is it create correctly. If you’re not the only person to use your PC, you may have faced many difficulties in protecting your personal data as well as in managing your data.

So then this is very important to you. So First, we talk about why we use separate user accounts and how we set up another user account. Then we will talk about why everyone should have a second user on their computer.

As all of you know everyone needs to save their own files, preferences, and settings without affecting other computer users. Just think your home has only one PC. So your brothers and sisters use it. Then you can not protect your personal files as well as you can not keep it as your interest. By using this solution, you can use one PC as a multiple PC :).

What is Administrator, Standard, and Managed accounts

Before creating new user accounts, it’s important to understand the different types of accounts.

  • Administrator: Administrator accounts are special accounts that are used for making changes to system settings or managing other people’s accounts. They have full access to every setting on the computer. Every computer will have at least one Administrator account, and if you’re the owner you should already have a password to this account.
  • Standard: Standard accounts are the basic accounts you use for normal everyday tasks. As a Standard user, you can do just about anything you would need to do, such as running software or personalizing your desktop.
  • Standard with Family Safety: These are the only accounts that can have parental controls. You can create a Standard account for each child, then go to the Family Safety settings in your Control Panel to set website restrictions, time limits, and more.

This is time to know how to create user accounts.

Add a new user account ( with a Microsoft account )

  1. Open the Settings app, then select Accounts.

2. Select Family & other users. Scroll down to the Other Users section, then choose Add someone else to this PC.

3. If the new user already has a Microsoft account, enter the associated email address, then click Next.

4. The user can then sign in to the computer with his or her Microsoft account information. Note that it may take several minutes to configure a user’s settings when logging in with a Microsoft account for the first time.

To add a new local user (without a Microsoft account)

  1. From the Account settings, click Add someone else to this PC.

2. Select The person I want to add doesn’t have an email address.

3. The account creation screen will appear. Select Add a user without a Microsoft account.

4. Enter an account name, then type the desired password. It’s important to choose a strong password

5. The local user can then sign in to the computer with this account information.

Although you are the only person using your pc, why another user account is important?

Let find out why a secondary user or a guest user is important if you are the only person using your computer. But it does not mean that another person does not use ever temporarily. Anytime we have to give our computer when someone asks. At that time we can not say “ I can not, sorry”. but you can say that but it is not good. So here is the solution…

How limited accounts protect you

This account-segregation system works because, unlike administrator accounts, limited accounts can’t install, update or remove applications and other executable software.

As a result, malware — viruses, worms, Trojans and so on — that tries to infect the machine through a limited account often won’t be able to install itself and won’t get a toehold. If it does manage to infect the limited account, it will normally affect only that user’s files, folders and user-specific applications. The malware usually won’t be able to get to the operating system or to other user accounts.

But…

Nor will this stop social-engineering attacks meant to fool you into giving up sensitive information. The truth is that only you can stop social-engineering attacks. But limited user accounts can stop almost everything else.

We will meet with another valuable article. Till then, stay safe…

Happy reading…

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