Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies. Ciprian Adrian Rusen

11 allows you to have more than one person logged in to a PC simultaneously. That’s convenient if, say, you’re working on the family PC and checking Billy’s homework when you hear the cat making noise in the kitchen and your spouse wants to put digital pictures from the family vacation on OneDrive while you run off to check the microwave.

      The capability to have more than one user logged in to a PC simultaneously is called fast user switching, and it has advantages and disadvantages:

       On the plus side: Fast user switching lets you keep all your programs going while somebody else pops on to the machine for a quick jaunt on the keyboard. When that person is done and logs off, you can pick up precisely where you left off before you got bumped.

       On the minus side: All idle programs left sitting around by the inactive (bumped) user can bog things down for the active user, although the effect isn’t drastic. You can avoid the overhead by logging off before the new user logs in.

      To switch users:

      1 Click or tap the start icon.

      2 Click or tap your username or picture, in the bottom-left corner of the Start menu.The menu shown in Figure 4-11 appears.FIGURE 4-11: The options you have for switching users.

      3 Do one of the following:Choose the name of the user you want to switch to (Digital Citizen in the figure). Authenticate using a PIN, a password, or Windows Hello.Choose Sign Out. On the sign-in screen, choose any user in the list and log in.

      

If you're at work, it's a good idea to lock your computer each time you’re not at your desk. To do that, at Step 3, choose Lock instead of Sign Out, or press Windows+L on your keyboard.