Guest PC Setup: Privacy Between Friends, Family and Renters

The account that draws the actual line

Windows has spent years quietly burying the idea of a guest account, and the built-in Visitor account is disabled for good reason. What still works is unglamorous and sufficient: a local Standard account of your own creation. A standard user can't read your profile folders, can't install software that hooks the system without your admin password, and can't change settings that affect the whole machine. Your own profile, meanwhile, gets a real password — not a blank one — because a lock only works if the door has one.

Create it under Settings → Accounts → Family & other users → Add other user → I don't have this person's sign-in information → Add a user without a Microsoft account. Give it a name like Guest, a simple password you don't care about, and answer the security questions with anything. The account exists to be deleted later; its password is a speed bump, not a vault door.

The five minutes before you hand over the keyboard

The account isolates the system, but your habits are the other half of the wall. Before the handover, run through this list once — it has held up through every lending situation we've seen in support mail. Most items take seconds, and none require a tool beyond Windows itself.

• Move work documents, tax files and password exports off Desktop and Downloads — those folders are in your profile, but they're the first place anyone looks.
• Sign browsers out of sync, or point the guest at a fresh browser profile, so your saved logins and history don't autocomplete for someone else.
• Check autofill: payment cards and saved addresses in the browser are visible to anyone who uses that profile.
• Sign out of messaging and mail apps completely, not just close them — autostart with remembered tokens is a real leak.
• Verify your own account locks: Win+L after switching users, and a lock timeout that isn't set to never.
• Say out loud what's allowed — installations, downloads, settings — because the rules you state verbally are the only ones a guest will follow.

After the guest leaves

When the visit is over, don't just change the password — audit, then delete. Check the installed apps list for surprise entries, review the browser's download history inside the guest profile, and look at Settings → Accounts to confirm nothing else was created. Then remove the account under Family & other users, which wipes its profile folder and the data inside it.

Apps the guest installed system-wide are a separate mess: their folders survive in ProgramData, Common Files and shared AppData locations even after a clean uninstall. That's the moment a leftover mapper earns its keep — Kleaner PRO, for instance, shows which folders belong to which program, so you delete evidence, not guesses. For rental machines and shared flats that see a constant rotation of people, do this after every guest, and keep your own profile boring: the less that lives on a shared machine, the less there is to protect.

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