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• ‹ Windows Vista Safety and Security
• User Accounts and Profiles
• Overview
• Types of user accounts
• Your user account profile and settings
• Change your user account picture
• Add / change your user account password
• Remove your user account's password
• Change your user name
• Change your user account type
• Switch user without logging off
• Lock your computer
• Create a new user account
• Disable a user's account
• Remove or delete a user's account

User accounts and profiles in Windows Vista

By default, Windows Vista (and recent versions of Windows) require that you be a user, with his or her set of preferences, applications, and permissions (individually stored under the "User Profile"). User accounts allow you to have multiple people use the same computer without having to compromise preferences and convenience: each Windows user has their own Windows experience; the only constant is the computer hardware - aside from that, each Vista users can have any level of customization they want. This series of tutorials go over the principle of users, the types of user accounts, the user profiles, etc. with respect to Windows Vista.

Manage your user account in Windows Vista

We will start this series of tutorials by giving you a brief overview of the types of user accounts you can setup in Windows Vista; you will then get an introduction to the user management screen that will be used throughout the remaining tutorials to manage your account, as well as other users' profiles: introduction to your user account profile and settings in Windows Vista.

You will next learn how to change your user account picture, add or change your user account's password, and how to remove your user account's password altogether (a rather unsafe option we don't recommend. Windows Vista also lets you change your user name and change your user account type after the fact.

Knowing how to switch user without logging off is a handy way to temporarily give another user access to your Vista PC.

We will finally show you three ways to lock your computer - while this tutorial focuses on Windows Vista, the information is still relevant for all versions of Windows since Windows 2000, Windows XP, and the server editions of Windows, as well as Windows NT.

Manage other Windows Vista users on your computer

In the second half of these tutorials, you will learn to manage other Windows users' accounts, by namely learning how to: create a new user account, disable a user's account (by changing the user profile's password), and finally, how to permanently remove, or delete, a user's account in Windows Vista.