When friends or family come to stay, they might want to borrow your computer for a while. That’s fine, but sometimes you want to keep your stuff private, and you want your personal settings to stay as they are.
That’s when it’s a good idea to make use of the built-in Guest Account, which you’ll find inside the Accounts pane of System Preferences, as long as you’re running OS X 10.5 (Leopard) or later.
You’ll have to enter your password to make changes inside this pane, but once that’s done you can switch on the Guest Account with one click.
It’s different to normal accounts. You don’t need a password to use it (so your guests needn’t bother asking you for one). They can save files while they’re making use of it, but they need to copy them to a USB stick or send them on by email before they stop using the computer, because once they log out of the Guest Account, everything created inside it gets deleted.
Yup, deleted. Every time the Guest Account gets fired up, it gets fired up as if it was brand new. You can’t store files inside it, or save browser bookmarks, or anything permanent.
You, as the computer administrator, can optionally allow users of the Guest Account to access Shared folders on the computer, or you can set up Parental Controls to further lock down what that account can and cannot do. Your choice.
These restrictions might sound harsh, but they really don’t get in the way for casual checking of web-based email accounts or looking up facts on the web. And that’s all your guests are likely to need, most of the time.
(You’re reading the 49th post in our series, 100 Essential Mac Tips And Tricks For Windows Switchers. These posts explain to OS X beginners some of the most basic and fundamental concepts of using a Mac. Find out more, or Grab the RSS feed.)
Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He also writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. You can find out more at his website, and follow him on Twitter @gilest.
16 responses to “100 Tips #49: Get Guests Online Quickly With The Guest Account”
I can not se an image of this post. Or it is just me?
not just you, something’s broken – thanks for letting me know. i’ll fix it asap.
can I just switch between my account & guest one? I tried switch between my other two over menu bar icon… it works… but when I want to use guest… the login window just begin shaking & nothing happen… Guest account must be used after boot like alone account, or I just doing it wrong? I can have 2 my accounts log in… & switch between them… but now I can;t do it with Guest too… sad
looks like we have a deeper problem with our images, probably something to do with moving to a new server in the last few days. we’re working on it.
I can use Fast User Switching to move to the Guest account on my computer. Not sure what the problem is you’re seeing.
The problem with Guest Accounts is that they are difficult to set up and maintain, and there are hassles using them.
Not really. You set it up once and you are done. There’s no maintenance because nothing is saved and the apps are all the same ones on your master account
took me all of 3 minutes to set one up when my cousin was in town. including putting it on simple finder with only safari and ichat (he’s not really mac savvy). If I had skipped that part then it would have been about 5 clicks to go into accounts, enable the guest account and turn on fast user switching
I’m sorry… my bad, it’s working now…