If they come to friends at home or every time you let someone use our laptop, what we must avoid at all costs is that these people can enter our accounts, see the sites we have surfed and find out our passwords. However, there is no denying a person to use our computer if he needs it so we must be prepared and provide them with an environment separate from ours, where they are free to do what they want, without risks that can spy on our things.
Without standing behind him, on any computer, Windows, Mac or Linux you can create a Guest account to use in these cases.
If, on the other hand, what the friend wants to do is just surf the internet, it can be enough only to provide him with a browser separate from ours .
We start from the Guest accounts which, speaking of Windows, must be enabled manually.
We have already seen how to create separate accounts on Windows and manage users of the computer, which is really useful when the same PC is used by several people in the family, so that each has his own documents, his desktop and his things separate from the others .
The Guest account, for the same reason, is very useful to make those who need it once only use the computer freely, without having to create a specific user account.
The Guest account is a limited user, who can browse the internet and use programs, but cannot tamper with the operating system and cannot in any way spy on passwords or open the main user's documents folder, e-mails, social media accounts, browser history and everything that is stored on the computer.
Guest accounts are unable to install programs, to configure hardware devices, to use USB sticks, to change system settings.
A Guest account has no login password, it can browse the web to use applications.
To enable the Guest account in Windows 7, 8 and XP, open the Control Panel and select the User Accounts option.
Then click on Add account or Manage another account to activate Guest .
To activate the Guest or Guest account in Windows 10 we can use a different procedure and create a new user via command prompt.
Press the right mouse button on the Start menu icon and press on Command Prompt (administrator) .
Then run the following commands by pressing the Enter key after each of them.
- First of all, create the guest account with the command:
net user Guest / add / active: yes
- To set a blank password for the Guest account, type:
net user Guest *
Then press Enter twice without writing anything else.
- Remove Guest from the user group to restrict permissions:
net localgroup users Guest / delete
- Add Guest to the Guests group:
net localgroup guests Guest / add
Close, disconnect from your account and on the login page you can find the Guest account, with limited permissions, ideal for use by friends who come to visit us or who need our PC.
On Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 you can also do a different thing, that is to configure assigned assigned access blocked on an application such as the web browser for the guest user.
Log out of the current user (or change the user by pressing the Windows-L key combination to not lose the open programs) and access the computer with Guest to do the initial configuration and see what appears to those who use the PC with this special mode .
Keep in mind that with the guest account, anyone can access and use the PC without password requests, even if they will not be able to access personal files or install software.
Also note that browsing history, websites visited and any other files or data saved on the disk will remain accessible to users of the computer.
If you want to use a guest account privately, you must use the incognito mode of the browser which leaves no traces .
On a Mac, you can log in as a guest user by selecting the account on the login screen.
If this option is not available, enable it in the Users and Groups panel of System Preferences.
Alternatively or in addition, without creating or having a Guest account used on the computer, you can create a different browser profile .
Personally, when a friend wants to surf the internet, being Chrome my default browser, I let him use Internet Explorer since I never use it.
However, having recently noticed that some friends are looking for the Chrome icon, to prevent them from going into my personal and personalized browser, with all the passwords saved inside and the history visible, I had to create a new Chrome icon on the desktop associated with a different profile.
To do this you can follow the guide on how to create user profiles on Chrome, Firefox and IE .
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