Local Users and Groups

By Jesse Franklin

Have you ever created a new user in 'User Accounts' in the Control Panel? Click Start, go to Settings, Control Panel, and User Accounts and create a user. This is a very simplified way of creating a new user. You can either choose Full Access or Limited Access and do not have the ability to change any Permissions. Permissions are settings that would grant or restrict a user specific access to files of folders. The Local Users and Groups snap-in will give you the ultimate control of the users on your computer. You have to be an administrator of your computer to perform actions in this snap-in.

Windows XP gives you a list of already made groups with the appropriate permissions given to each group and lets you decide which groups you will need depending on the users' needs. To see what a certain group does, just read the description next to the group name.

Each user will have a box called User's Properties. To see the box, just right click on the user's name and click Properties. You can also double-click the user's name. In the user's Properties box you can perform a number of administrative functions for each user. If a user forgets his/ her password, you can change it here. If you want to make a roaming profile (something we won't get into here) you can do so in the Profile page.

To create a user, right-click 'Users', and click 'New User'. Give the user a name and password. Set the password options by using the check boxes. They are self explanatory.

It will take a lot of time to create, let's say, five users for work and give them an assortment of access, but not administrative access. Instead of doing this in every user's Properties box, it is easier to simply add the users you've created to the group that you want them to belong to. To do this you will click on Groups. Right click on the group that you want to add the new users to and click Properties. Click Add, and in the space provided you will type a user's name and then click OK. Do this until all the users are added to the appropriate groups.

Article last reviewed: 03/24/2004

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