The Security Mentor

I wish I could take credit for this idea. In fact, I wish I could even remember who came up with it so that I could give him/her credit.

Most people don't take full advantage of being able to create multiple login accounts on XP. They're handy for letting more than one person use the computer with minimum interference but you may also want to have more than one login account for a given person.

Why would you do something as strange as giving one person multiple accounts? Because different accounts can have different privileges. The first and simplest thing to do is to create one account that's allowed to "Administer this computer" and another that isn't. If you do your daily work on the non-Administrator account then XP's security mechanisms will limit the damage from any nasty software you download by accident.

Now comes the fun part that makes this all convenient. You can log in to both accounts at once. Use the non-Administrator account for web surfing and other potentially dangerous activities. Then when you need to install software, defragment the disk, or anything else that's limited to Administrators, just switch over to the other login session.