Ciprian Adrian Rusen - Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies

Create/Change a Password: Again, this option appears only for local accounts. ( Create appears if the account doesn’t have a password; Change appears if the account already has a password.) If you create a password for the chosen user, Windows 11 requires a password to log in with that user account. You can’t get past the sign-in screen (using that account) without it. This setting is weird because you can change it for other people. You can force Bill to use a password when none was required before, you can change Bill’s password, or you can even make it blank. Passwords are cAse SenSitive — you must enter the password, with uppercase and lowercase letters, precisely the way it was originally typed. If you can’t get the computer to recognize your password, make sure that the Caps Lock setting is off. That’s the number-one source of login frustration. Much has been written about the importance of choosing a secure password, mixing uppercase and lowercase letters with punctuation marks, ensuring that you have a long password, and so on. I have only two admonitions: First, don’t write your password on a yellow sticky note attached to your monitor. Second, don’t use the easily guessed passwords that the Conficker worm employed to crack millions of systems, as listed in Table 4-1. Good advice from a friend: Create a simple sentence you can remember and swap out some letters for numbers (G00dGr1efTerry), or think of a sentence and use only the first letters! (toasaoutfl!) Of course, using a PIN, a Windows Hello mugshot, a fingerprint, or an iris scan makes even more sense.

Change the Account Type: You can use this option to change accounts from administrator to standard and back again.

Delete the Account: Get rid of the account, if you’re that bold (or mad, in all senses of the term). If you’re deleting a Windows 11 account, the account itself still lives — it just won’t be permitted to log in to this computer. Windows offers to keep copies of the deleted account’s Documents folder and desktop, but warns you quite sternly and correctly that if you snuff the account, you rip out all the email messages, user files, and other settings that belong to the user — definitely not a good way to make friends. Oh, and you can’t delete your own account, of course, so this option won’t appear if your PC has only one account.

Manage Another Account: Displays the list of accounts so you can choose another user and modify the user's account using the options just described.

TABLE 4-1Most Frequently Used Passwords *

* From the Conficker worm, bowdlerized with an asterisk (*) as a fig leaf

Windows 11 allows you to have more than one person logged in to a PC simultaneously. That’s convenient if, say, you’re working on the family PC and checking Billy’s homework when you hear the cat making noise in the kitchen and your spouse wants to put digital pictures from the family vacation on OneDrive while you run off to check the microwave.

The capability to have more than one user logged in to a PC simultaneously is called fast user switching, and it has advantages and disadvantages:

On the plus side: Fast user switching lets you keep all your programs going while somebody else pops on to the machine for a quick jaunt on the keyboard. When that person is done and logs off, you can pick up precisely where you left off before you got bumped.

On the minus side: All idle programs left sitting around by the inactive (bumped) user can bog things down for the active user, although the effect isn’t drastic. You can avoid the overhead by logging off before the new user logs in.

To switch users:

1 Click or tap the start icon.

2 Click or tap your username or picture, in the bottom-left corner of the Start menu.The menu shown in Figure 4-11 appears. FIGURE 4-11:The options you have for switching users.

3 Do one of the following: Choose the name of the user you want to switch to (Digital Citizen in the figure). Authenticate using a PIN, a password, or Windows Hello. Choose Sign Out. On the sign-in screen, choose any user in the list and log in.