To do this press CTRL + ALT + DELETE in sequence make sure you don’t release any of the key until you see this window pop out:

You’ll see the Windows Task Manager, from this application you can actually do a lot:

1. Kill applications that hang-up or is just eating too much CPU cycle.
2. See how much CPU cycle is your system eating, if it reaches 100% expect your system to be rather hot.
3. See how much memory an application is using.
4. View a graphical representation of your CPU and network activity.
5. See users that are logged on (only true when you have a couple of profiles in your computer).
6. Shutdown, reboot or log-off from your computer.
7. View all the running applications on your profile and other profiles (if its currently logged on and you have switched to the current profile).

Its pretty handy actually and its something I use on a daily basis. To view how much CPU cycle is an application using click on the Process tab and then click on the CPU column twice until you see the high numbers of the CPU column at the top.

For this demonstration what you see on my system is that 98% of the CPU is idle and 2% is being used by firefox. exe (which is actually the Firefox browser). There’s a catch to this though, you need to know the exact Image Name of the application that you are looking for (the actual executable).

Actual image names don’t always match to the application’s title, like the World of Warcraft game, the actual image name that shows up on Windows Task Manager is wow.exe. ^_^

What do you do? Easy you just click on the Start button hit Log Off, then click on the Switch User button.

Now that is if you have fast switching enabled (which is by the way enabled by default). Now what if when you click the Log Off button and instead of seeing the option above you see this.

Click Log Off and you lose all your work, not a very good idea. This also means one thing. Fast user switching has been disabled. A program can disable it or somebody with administrative rights has disabled it, but regardless of reason  you need to enable it so that you don’t have to close all your applications just to open another profile.

To enable fast user switching:

1. Open the Windows Control Panel.

2. Look for an icon named User Accounts and open the application.

3. On the User Accounts window click on the Change the way users log on or off link.

4. On the next window make sure both of these options are checked. Use the Welcome screen and Use Fast User Switching.

5. Click apply and you are done. When you click on the Log Off button again you should see the Switch User button.

Oh and a tip, by using shortcut keys you can instantaneously switch to the Welcome screen. To do this press the Window key and the letter L simultaneously (make sure that you press the window key first).

Almost immediately you will be switched to the Welcome screen. One last note, if you are a bit short on memory (say your system only has 512 MB which kinda sucks), switching back and forth between profiles may take a long time. Even if it were me though, I’d rather switch slow than have to start all over again after I log off my profile. ^_^

What’s a guest account if you may ask. Its an existing (dormant) account on Windows XP that only has very limited user privileges. Anyone using the Guest account can do everything else except install/uninstall programs, delete files (not unless it was created from the Guest account) and change system settings.

Basically anything that administrators can do are disabled in the Guest user account. This however is disabled by default. To enable the Guest user account.

1. Go to the Windows XP Control Panel.

2. Look for the User Accounts icon and open it.

3. You should see the User Accounts window. Click on the Guest icon.

4. You’ll be asked if you want to turn on the guest user account. Click on the Turn On the Guest Account button and you are done.

5. Once it has been enabled, you can click the same icon again to either change the picture (icon) of the guest account or disable it.

Take note though that you can’t set a password for the guest account so practically anyone can use the account once its enabled. Oh, I almost forgot even though guest users can’t do anything to your system, they may still be able to view some of your personal documents if you haven’t set it to private. ^_^