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Create a Spare User, It May Help Rescue Your Computer Later
The Problem
One day you start up (or wake up) your computer, and for some reason it rejects the password you’ve always used (*). Or, you’ve never had to enter a user password on start-up before, but now for some strange reason it’s asking for one, and you don’t know what to type.
Either way, you’re effectively locked out of your computer. What do you do? What could you have done beforehand to prepare for this?
There are certainly a number of sophisticated Windows and Macintosh “recovery” or “password reset” techniques that can solve this problem (including calling someone you know and trust to help). However, my advice here is focused on how you can solve problems like this in a much simpler way with just a little advance preparation.
(*) It’s also possible that a faulty keyboard may cause your computer to reject the correct password that you’re trying to type (and dust, food, scraps of paper, or other debris may also have fallen between the keys), so keep that in mind as well.
The simple thing you can do in advance: Create a spare user
This will take you about 5-10 minutes, and might save you (or a technician) hours of effort if a problem develops in the future. Here’s an overview of the steps involved, the details will depend on which operating system your computer is running.
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Windows: Go to Settings or Control Panel; Macintosh: Go to System Settings or System Preferences
- Click on Accounts, User Accounts, Users, or Users and Groups.
- Create a new “local” user on your computer. On Windows, do not associate this new user with a Microsoft account. You may see “Add a user without a Microsoft account” or “I don’t have this person’s sign-in information” or other similar phrasing which you can click to make this choice.
- Choose a simple username like “Spare,” “Spare User,” or “Emergency User.”
- Make a careful choice regarding the user password: Either assign a password or decide to have no password. Before doing anything else, add this new user name and password combination to your password chart for your records.
- Make this spare user an Administrator. If that question doesn’t specifically come up during the creation process, the default user type is probably Standard, so after creating the spare user, go back and change it to an Administrator. This is extremely important. The spare user will not help you in the future if you skip this step.
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Sign in to the spare user for the first time. You can either “sign out” of your primary user first or “switch” to the spare user without signing out.
- On Macintosh, the first time you sign in to a new user, it will ask to connect to an existing iCloud account (or to create a new one). Skip this step.
- Change the spare user’s Desktop so you’ll be able to tell at a glance that you’re not signed in to your primary user. This is important, especially if you accidentally sign in to the spare user in the future, to prevent you from feeling panicked because it will look like “everything has disappeared.” Here are 3 simple approaches: a. Change the spare user’s Desktop background picture (“wallpaper”) to something that’s very different from your primary’s, e.g., a solid color or distinctive picture. b. Create a custom Desktop picture that displays the text “You are currently signed in as your Spare user” on a plain background. c. Put an icon on the Desktop with a name like “SPARE USER” (all caps).
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The spare user is now ready for your future use. Sign out and return to your primary user.
- Get into the habit of always creating a spare user on every computer you use.
- Recommend this to other people as appropriate.
Benefits of creating a spare user
Having a spare, local, administrator user gives you a number of benefits, including:
- If a major problem develops with your primary user, you might user your spare user to try to solve it. For example, if there’s something wrong with your primary user, you can use the spare user to easily reset your primary user’s password, run diagnostics, back up or restore your data, create additional users, etc.
- You can also use it to diagnose problems that might come up. For example, if you’re having a problem with email or a website under your primary user and that problem doesn’t also occur under your spare user, you might conclude that the issue is specific to your primary user. However, if that problem does also occur under your spare user, then that problem is more likely to either involve the computer as a whole, or it may have nothing to do with your computer at all.
Another reason for creating additional user accounts
If multiple people are sharing one computer, creating a separate user for each person is usually a good idea since it keeps each person’s data separate, lets them customize how the Desktop looks, and more.
Also, if a given person would not normally install software or perform any computer maintenance, it’s a good idea to make their user be a Standard account, not an Administrator.
Where to go from here
As always, if any of my advice seems too difficult to follow, I recommend that you find someone you know and trust who can help you.
In the searches below, replace “X” with either “Windows” or “Macintosh.”
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