Adjusting User Accounts in Windows 7

Windows has a few settings that are set on a per-user basis, and some of them can be set in only one particular way, using the following steps. You don’t necessarily need to do this now. If you want to, you can skip ahead to the next section. To see the list of user account settings you can change, click Start, Control Panel, User Accounts and Family Safety; then click the User Accounts title at the top of the right-hand pane. The most common tasks are listed in the window’s larger pane. These include options to change your password and the picture associated with your account, which we discussed earlier.

Look through the Tasks list on the left side of the screen. These selections appear only when you open the User Accounts control panel this particular way, and they have the following uses:

• Create a Password Reset Disk—Creates a disk that you can use to log on if you forget your password, as discussed in the previous section.

• Manage Your Network Passwords—Lets you add, delete, or change passwords that have been remembered by Windows for use on remote servers or websites. One useful feature here is that you can back up these passwords to a disk and copy them to your account on another computer.

• Manage Your File Encryption Certificates—Use this wizard to create, back up, or restore the certificates (keys) used to encrypt your files, on Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate editions only.

• Configure Advanced User Profile Properties—If your computer is on a domain network, you can select whether your user profile should be copied back and forth to the file server (a roaming profile) or just kept on the computer in front of you (a local profile).

• Change My Environment Variables—You can customize environment variables for your account here. Environment variables tell Windows applications where to look for executable files, where to store temporary files, and so on.