User Accounts

Once relegated only to the corporate market, where they have always made sense because of their security and permissions boundaries, user accounts are central to today’s PC experience–so central, in fact, that you establish your user account when you first install Windows or set up your new PC.

Of course, user accounts aren’t generally as restrictive at home as they are at work. It’s your PC, after all, and most people rightly feel that they should be able to do anything they want on their PC. So that first user account you create, during Windows Setup, is automatically an administrator‑class account, providing the permissions and access control that one would expect.

Families can further manage accounts using parental controls, which we’ll examine later in the chapter.

These local user accounts, or what we used to call workgroup accounts, work well enough for what they are. And they allow for some niceties, even at home. You can create multiple accounts on a single PC, giving users their own sign‑in identity, along with its associated custom settings (desktop wallpapers and so on) and Windows and application configurations.

But local user accounts are starting to show the strain of time, and as our PC usage changes, so do the needs we place on them. For example, most people don’t bother to protect their own user accounts with a password, which can have huge ramifications in the event of a stolen PC. Local accounts are literally local to that one PC and thus hard, if not impossible, to replicate across machines; if you have more than one PC, as so many of us do now, making each one look and work the same is tedious. Local accounts make home network sharing difficult, too, which is why Microsoft created the homegroup sharing technique for Windows 7.

What’s interesting is that Microsoft basically solved these issues over a decade ago when they instituted the Active Directory domain services scheme in Windows Server. This system, which is used by corporations around the world, provides a more centralized approach to user accounts (and other things). So instead of signing in to a single PC and locking all of your personalized settings to that one machine, you sign in, instead, to the domain. And if you need to access a different machine, your customized experience can travel with you, so to speak, from PC to PC. With this scheme, the settings you typically think of being associated with an account are no longer locked into a single PC.

Active Directory is powerful and interesting, but it’s also far too complex for a home network and of course requires expensive and complex servers in addition to the PCs that people actually use each day. So this system isn’t well‑suited for regular users at home.

So for Windows 8, Microsoft has created a new type of user account, based on your Microsoft account (previously called Windows Live ID) that provides many of the niceties of Active Directory but with none of the complexity. In fact, for most people, signing in to a Windows 8 PC with a Microsoft account is just as easy as doing so with a traditional local account. But there are numerous advantages to doing so.

So let’s examine them as part of a wider discussion about the types of accounts you can use with Windows 8.