12 November, 2011
Leading on from our article last week about the work required to reformat a computer, another thing that we still haven’t addressed is multiple logons. So what is this all about? Multiple logons are simply created when more than one person users the same PC and wants their own personalised profile or logon. Many PC’s are set up to go straight to the usable windows screen from the time when you first turn them on, without any intervention. The next step up from this is putting a password on your logon, to provide extra security to your personal files. When more than one person wants to use the same PC a second ‘user profile’ is created and then when the PC is first turned on you will then be confronted with a screen asking you to choose a user and provide a password.
This gives the user a warm fuzzy feeling about their PC experience as they can then customise the look and sound of the PC to suit their own personal tastes. They can have their own screen saver, background, windows theme, custom colours, custom sounds, but what else has happened in the background? Windows has created a separate ‘user profile’ and now there is a separate documents store, as well as a separate email, address book, music, downloads and photos store. This has now created a potential new problem – backup. That is, if both of the users (or it could even be 10 individual users) wants to have their own logon then they also need to be responsible for backing up their own files. We have seen plenty of disasters where this was not done and critical data was stored under a logon profile that was never getting backed up.
So while having your own user profile on a PC is a ‘nice to have’ keep in mind that you need to be making a regular and full back up of all of your won files and if a reformat of the PC is need then all of the user profiles get wiped and will need to be setup again from scratch. One more tip is that often individual users forget their own password which can effectively lock them out of their own files. This is a problem that any good IT company will be able to rectify for you. Kerr Solutions is at 128 Musgrave Street & is contactable on 49 222 400.
