How to Enable the Guest User Account in Windows XP
Need to share your computer? Make sure you only have access to your own account. For everyone else, let them use the Guest user account.
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. ^_^
Previous post: How to Change the Mouse Pointer Speed
Next post: How Can I Switch Users or Profiles Without Logging Off
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Goodness thank you, very helpful, is there a newsletter where I can subscribe? Im a total computer dummy and some guides out there assume too much from people like me. I think even my 11 yr old grand son can understand this!
You mentioned setting documents to private what do you mean and how do i do that? is it hiding documents?
@ludwig
At the moment none yet, you can subscribe via RSS feed though (I might need to make another post about that). I certainly appreciate your feedback, all the more reason that I want to make this blog very friendly even with eleven year old kids.
I’m taking notes of comments and some e-mails I get from time to time, suggestions are very important to me and I’ll definitely work on making this site more useful in the next coming months.
Meanwhile, a big project is coming up, so I’ll try my best to post daily. This might put back things I’ve planned for this blog for a couple of weeks, but we’ll see. Keep in touch. ^_^
@ludwig
i already have a video about that http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2uGKbKCkMo