not true, the guest account is present and can be enabled like any other account. in the policy editor you can allow/disallow functionality as well as in any other windows account
When I logged into guest account, it gave me “sihost” error. So I logged into my admin account and disabled it using command prompt in Administrator mode. The command was successfully executed, and the guest account is disabled, but it is still showing up in my lock screen, as well as my start menu. Although when I click the Guest account, it shows “Guest account is disabled”, but then it won’t go away.
Not totally true. Yes you cant make new guest account. But I had a Guest account before updating windows 10, And I am able to login without password. It is broken though ,no denying that. It crashes at logon itself , with only desktop background and an alert (No taskbar/icons). But I am able to get it to work using CTRL-ALT-DEL ->TaskManager ->explorer.exe.
But still the taskbar is not usable (Clicking on windows icon does nothing.)
I am confused about this,Should I
a). Turn Guest OFF by the method described in the article.
OR
b). Keep it as an antique windows feature. 🙂 Until me/someone else finds a complete fix.
Mike Masters
8 years ago
I agree it is messed up. A note about your symptom description – I am able to get W10 both Pro and Home (I had installed group policy manager) to provide Guest as a possible login and clicking it does appear to login and even displays start bar and some desktop – However — before I can do any work as Guest – several errors about Host Infrastructure Shell stopping occur and clearing them eventually causes the whole start bar to go away and must Ctrl-Alt-Delete to get a way to log out or view Task Manager. I am taking your advice and giving up on getting this working!
I totally agree with you. I lost hours trying to enable it and got the same “Host Infrastructure Shell stopping error. Microsoft haven’t publish much about it that can be found easily.
Robert G.
8 years ago
Any suggestions for how to create an account with the “Guest” functionality in Windows 10? I’m setting up computers for a public lab, and I don’t want the users to get up to any mischief, and I don’t want to require a password.
You should try the Assigned access feature in Windows 10. It's found in Settings -> Accounts -> Family & others. There, you should click Set up assigned access.
Ah yes, that points me in the right direction. Thank you! Looks like I’m going to have to upgrade the computers from Home to Pro, though, to get Assigned Access.
My pleasure.
I hope I had find it faster as I lost hours to get the answer.
Good guess’ing’
Dave Burton
7 years ago
Your first bullet is wrong. You say, “It [The Guest account] doesn’t have a password and passwords cannot be set for it.”
However, it’s just a little less obvious how to set the password on the Windows 7 (and presumably 8.x) Guest account. My Guest account had a password in Windows 7. Google will tell you how to set it.
Please check my reviewed post for a solution that’s working in any Windows 10 version, including Home.
Alfi
7 years ago
How to create a guest user account for Windows 10
Type “cmd.exe” (without quotes) into the Windows search box.
Right-click “Command Prompt”.
Select “Run as administrator”.
In the command prompt window, type “notepad.exe” and type “Enter”.
Copy the following lines of code in Notepad.
net user Guest /active:no
net user /add /passwordchg:no /passwordreq:no /logonpasswordchg:no
net localgroup Guests /add
net localgroup Users /delete
Replace “” with the name you want to use for your guest account. You can not use “Guest” since that name is reserved by Windows for backward compatibility.
Copy the modified content of the notepad and paste it into the Command Prompt window, including the end of line character.
If your Windows 10 computer is part of an Active Directory domain and you want to add this functionality to all your client computers, perform the same procedure as above on your domain controller, but replace the code with the following lines.
net user Guest /active:no /domain
net user /add /passwordchg:no /passwordreq:no /logonpasswordchg:no /domain
net group “Domain Guests” /add /domain
dsa.msc
pause
net group “Domain Users” /delete /domain
The MMC console “Active Directory Users and Computers” opens.
Select the “Users” node.
Double-click your newly created guest user.
Select the “Member of” tab.
Select “Domain Guests” and click the “Set Primary Group” button.
Click “OK”.
Close the console.
Give the focus to your “Command Prompt” window.
Hit “Enter”.
If your Windows computer 10 uses a version in another language than English, perform the same procedure as above, but first:
Type “net user” to identify the localized name of the user account “Guest”.
Type “net localgroup” to identify localized names of “Guests” and “Users” groups.
Copy the following lines of code in Notepad.
net user Guest /active:no
net user /add /passwordchg:no /passwordreq:no /logonpasswordchg:no
net localgroup /add
net localgroup /delete
Replace “Guest”, and with localized names that you identified in the previous step.
You can now sign in with your newly created guest user.
Good luck and if you want more info, feel free to reply to my message.
Running lusrmgr.msc as an administrator opens the console but it is disabled: “This snapin may not be used with this edition of Windows 10”
SM
7 years ago
Hi all,
My suggestion is, simply to create a user as “Guest Account” under the option “Add a user without a Microsoft account”.
Tony
7 years ago
I asked a question about this on the Microsoft Answers Help Forum and got a response who is tagged as a Microsoft Support Engineer. Of course the tips provided did not work. Why should I have gotten a false response even in their own forum??
DAVID LEY
7 years ago
Actually, this worked mint for allowing the ability for unpassworded LAN networked access to specific folders I designated. (In the advanced sharing, permissions area.) But the rest of my shared folders remains behind a locked system.
Before friends weren’t able to enter the system because ‘guest’ wasn’t enabled, once I entered in the cmd string, friends that stopped over didn’t need both wireless, AND computer access codes to access media folders.
So yeah, while the guest account itself isn’t that overly useful, it’s still quite handy for unpassworded access into network shares.
Keith Lewis
7 years ago
At least as of Build 15048 rs 2, it is available again… in a way. MS has changed the name from “Guest” to “Visitor”. They list how to enable it here:
“MS has changed the name from “Guest” to “Visitor””
That’s a goofy interpretation of the facts. Microsoft didn’t “change the name”. The steps described above simply create a whole new account, which could be named *anything* you want (except a name that already exists, of course, like “Guest”), and have always been a viable way (since all the way back to Windows XP at least, probably NT 3.5) to create a “guest” account.
Note that when following these steps, you can call the account whatever you want. If you change the “Display Name” (using e.g. the Computer Management tool) to “Guest”, then what users will see is “Guest”, even with the account name being something else.
Alan Sears
6 years ago
I must have missed the point here. I have read all the sites advocating the Command Prompt method (DOS), found none of them worked, then I tried this (and it worked):
1) Click on Start and go to Settings>Accounts>Family & Other People>Add someone else to this PC
2) Click on “I don’t have this person’s sign-in information”
3) Click on “Add a user without a Microsoft account”
4) Enter “Visitor” or “Friend” or some such in the Username box. (I didn’t use “Guest” in case it clashed with some MS issue.)
5) Click on Next and you’re done.
To delete a user account the “old” way still works (Control PanelUser AccountsUser AccountsManage Accounts etc)
Your procedure works and it is correct. However, you create a Standard user account, with no admin rights. You don’t create the former Guest account, which is even more limited than the standard user account.
Thank you, I missed that one, and I shouldn’t have. I just needed a log in for occasional public presentations by visitors, who have had to log in to my account until now, and this is good enough. A pity, however, that Microsoft seems sometimes to make life difficult for some of us in the name of Corporate Users.
Trev P
6 years ago
You can enable guest account . its very simple.
go to Windows Administration tools, Select local security policy, Local Policies, Then User rights assignment go down the list until you find deny log on locally. Here you will find that Guest is denied. simply select and remove Guest from the deny list and your good to go. it works flawlessly on all of my machines. Hope This helps.
Hello, lets say you were in windows 7 and you had a handful of data in the guest account, like pictures, music files etc. then you decide to upgrade to windows 10. I’m in windows 10, and I realized that windows 10 doesn’t support a guest account. But some of my data was in guest. Would it be possible to retrieve the data lost?
Open File Explorer and try to go to C:UsersGuest. See if you can access it and retrieve your files.
Anthony
6 years ago
I mean you’re right, except for the part whre you’re completly wrong about it not being doable because the ICD can enable guest logins without problems and is fully supported by MS…
I can’t even use my laptop. I’ve tried opening the guest account and it stacked there. Every time I restart or turn off, the guest account is still trying to open but it won’t. Its been weeks now. What to do? Help please
Yehya
6 years ago
Thanks a lot for that informative and accurate article
You are welcome. Do not hesitate to subscribe to our newsletter, for more useful content.
M$Winblows-$ma$her!
5 years ago
none of the above work under Win10Home …
not for this user at least …
in fact, on a good desktop running Win10Home and using an administrator-enabled account, i can’t even run the cmd prompt as administrator either! it simply doesn’t work that way at all!
workaround: not the best solution but just create a regular user account WITHOUT administrator rights and name it something like Guest or Visitor (or whatever Winblows lets you do!) and let your guests use that account instead … (but beware not to let naughty people with hacking abilities use that account!) 😉
timelmer
5 years ago
So, after removing Guest from the “Deny log on locally” list, and enabling the guest user in computer management, I have an account named Guest that I can log in to and get an explorer shell. I’m not sure I agree with your claim that the Guest account has been removed.
Scott Warren
5 years ago
You are wrong. I was able to go to Computer Mgmt, Users+Groups. Create a new account (std User, local). Put it in the “Guest” group, then remove it from the “User” group. Login (using a password!, though it didn’t try it w/o), and it does exactly what you’d expect a guest acct to do, and nothing more – incl. no settings saved, no add’l apps created, restricted access to folders, etc.
Is it truly a guest acc’t or a std local user acc’t? Not sure. Does it matter? NO.
For all intents & purposes, this is a working guest acc’t on Win10 (x64Ent_v1803).
Val
5 years ago
Great article, this explains things. Thank you!
Thomas Russell
5 years ago
Thanks so much for authoring this article. Really wish I had read this one first…
Unfortunately, most sites promise false things, without understanding the minor details that make a difference. Also, some people that read this article, ignore my arguments as falsehoods and do not get that this feature is gone. I wish that Microsoft had published a blog post on this topic and explained things for everyone.
Hi Ciprian. Not sure if you are the right one to ask. I have set up a local user “ChromeOnly” on Windows10 via the commandlines you provided above, so removed this user from the localgroup “users” via “net localgroup users ChromeOnly /delete” but I ommitted the adding of this user ChromeOnly to the localgroup guests via “net localgroup guests ChromeOnly /add”. In other words, the user “ChromeOnly” is not member of any localgroup.
With this user “ChromeOnly” I’m running the Google Chrome browser via:
runas /user:ChromeOnly “C:Program Files (x86)GoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe”
All seems to be working fine.
Question: is a user that is not member of any localgroup even more secure than a user that is only member of the localgroup “guests”?
John
4 years ago
“Unfortunately, there are websites that lie to you for a bit of traffic and a quick buck.”
.
Out of all the forums and the websites, this one nailed it in the head. I dislike finding tons of search results only to realize they omitted a vital info and pretty much is useless. It’s a good thing I found this site, thank you. ^_^
John
4 years ago
(continuation)
I guess now, I need to find a way to make a standard account be restricted much like a guest account.
chris
4 years ago
Nice, thanks! Saved me from a bunch of headaches.
SkyBase
4 years ago
On Build 1903 released in march Going through the following steps does enable the guest account
with a combination of all the options and then of course changing the privileges and setting a password the Guest Account does enable. I set my guest account as my second administrator to use the default accounts of windows.
Siddhartha
4 years ago
Thanks for guiding, else I was also following those misguided articles.
david
4 years ago
I’m afraid you made a mistake. Method 1 (creating an account in guest groups) does actually create a guest account. An account in this group can’t access settings, can’t change their password (since they cant run settings), or install software to their profile such as store apps. They also can’t run OneDrive. The profile in control panel (under user profiles) always lists them as temporary. However the only thing it doesn’t replicate is the ability to delete files automatically at log off, though I think this was also the case with windows 8?
Largest Android Tablets
3 years ago
I was more than happy to uncover this great site. I need to to thank you for your time due to this fantastic read!! I definitely enjoyed every bit of it and I have you bookmarked to see new information on your blog.
BadInfo
3 years ago
Don’t you just love it when someone says “it doesn’t work as of 2015, and it won’t work in all future version”?
How can you POSSIBLY know what “all future versions” of Windows will/won’t support?
Do you know all about Windows 10 version 2030 too?
Because this is the official plan, and so far nothing has changed about this feature.
Mayr Manfred
2 years ago
thank you Ciprian , very useful contribution !
David
2 years ago
Hi I know this is an old article but Microsoft have actually “fixed” the built in guest account a couple of years ago. If you log in to it, it no longer crashes and can be used without errors. I first tried it on Windows 2004 version but it may have been fixed earlier? The built in guest account is very slightly more restricted than another account in the guest group. For example:
1. You cant sign in to any app, even Edge Chromium or Office. You get an error.
2. The Windows Security app wont work, so you cant do a manual scan with Defender.
3. Some Powershell programs don’t run. They bring up an error
4. Even if network and sharing is disabled, it seems the built in guest account totally ignores this setting and makes you PC visible! This is a serious security issue if you were connecting to say a public WIFI. I suspect this is why it was disabled!
5. The start menu, search and notifications don’t work. This means if you want to run a program you have to search for it manually via File Explorer (not very useful!) I don’t know if this is by design, or if its a bug?
6. The power button doesn’t work. Therefore to sign out or switch off, you have to press CTRL+ALT+DEL.
Good one. It’s indeed the Guest account is a misleading fake account that should be disable completely.
True that. Microsoft should have also disabled the methods for "enabling" it.
not true, the guest account is present and can be enabled like any other account. in the policy editor you can allow/disallow functionality as well as in any other windows account
You can create it using Active Directory by just enabling the “guest” user.
When I logged into guest account, it gave me “sihost” error. So I logged into my admin account and disabled it using command prompt in Administrator mode. The command was successfully executed, and the guest account is disabled, but it is still showing up in my lock screen, as well as my start menu. Although when I click the Guest account, it shows “Guest account is disabled”, but then it won’t go away.
Please help. Thank you.
and why is that?????
I would love to allow my daughter to use my laptop when she is visiting
I trust her more than anyone is this world
Not totally true. Yes you cant make new guest account. But I had a Guest account before updating windows 10, And I am able to login without password. It is broken though ,no denying that. It crashes at logon itself , with only desktop background and an alert (No taskbar/icons). But I am able to get it to work using CTRL-ALT-DEL ->TaskManager ->explorer.exe.
But still the taskbar is not usable (Clicking on windows icon does nothing.)
I am confused about this,Should I
a). Turn Guest OFF by the method described in the article.
OR
b). Keep it as an antique windows feature. 🙂 Until me/someone else finds a complete fix.
I agree it is messed up. A note about your symptom description – I am able to get W10 both Pro and Home (I had installed group policy manager) to provide Guest as a possible login and clicking it does appear to login and even displays start bar and some desktop – However — before I can do any work as Guest – several errors about Host Infrastructure Shell stopping occur and clearing them eventually causes the whole start bar to go away and must Ctrl-Alt-Delete to get a way to log out or view Task Manager. I am taking your advice and giving up on getting this working!
I totally agree with you. I lost hours trying to enable it and got the same “Host Infrastructure Shell stopping error. Microsoft haven’t publish much about it that can be found easily.
Any suggestions for how to create an account with the “Guest” functionality in Windows 10? I’m setting up computers for a public lab, and I don’t want the users to get up to any mischief, and I don’t want to require a password.
You should try the Assigned access feature in Windows 10. It's found in Settings -> Accounts -> Family & others. There, you should click Set up assigned access.
Ah yes, that points me in the right direction. Thank you! Looks like I’m going to have to upgrade the computers from Home to Pro, though, to get Assigned Access.
That Guest feature was sure useful….
Under ‘Settings’ – ‘Accounts’ there is no choice ‘Family & Others’.
‘Assigned access’ is also nowhere to be found.
Correction.
There is ‘Family & others’ option under ‘Accounts’ if signed in with admin account.
But still, there is no ‘Assigned access’ option there.
And now I get it: “Assigned access can only be set up on Windows 10 Pro, Windows 10 Mobile, Education, and Enterprise.”
Sorry for the confusion.
Really grateful for your explanation, really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
I hope I had find it faster as I lost hours to get the answer.
Good guess’ing’
Your first bullet is wrong. You say, “It [The Guest account] doesn’t have a password and passwords cannot be set for it.”
However, it’s just a little less obvious how to set the password on the Windows 7 (and presumably 8.x) Guest account. My Guest account had a password in Windows 7. Google will tell you how to set it.
Hello Dave,
Please check my reviewed post for a solution that’s working in any Windows 10 version, including Home.
How to create a guest user account for Windows 10
Type “cmd.exe” (without quotes) into the Windows search box.
Right-click “Command Prompt”.
Select “Run as administrator”.
In the command prompt window, type “notepad.exe” and type “Enter”.
Copy the following lines of code in Notepad.
net user Guest /active:no /add /passwordchg:no /passwordreq:no /logonpasswordchg:no /add /delete
net user
net localgroup Guests
net localgroup Users
Replace “” with the name you want to use for your guest account. You can not use “Guest” since that name is reserved by Windows for backward compatibility.
Copy the modified content of the notepad and paste it into the Command Prompt window, including the end of line character.
If your Windows 10 computer is part of an Active Directory domain and you want to add this functionality to all your client computers, perform the same procedure as above on your domain controller, but replace the code with the following lines.
net user Guest /active:no /domain /add /passwordchg:no /passwordreq:no /logonpasswordchg:no /domain /add /domain /delete /domain
net user
net group “Domain Guests”
dsa.msc
pause
net group “Domain Users”
The MMC console “Active Directory Users and Computers” opens.
Select the “Users” node.
Double-click your newly created guest user.
Select the “Member of” tab.
Select “Domain Guests” and click the “Set Primary Group” button.
Click “OK”.
Close the console.
Give the focus to your “Command Prompt” window.
Hit “Enter”.
If your Windows computer 10 uses a version in another language than English, perform the same procedure as above, but first:
Type “net user” to identify the localized name of the user account “Guest”.
Type “net localgroup” to identify localized names of “Guests” and “Users” groups.
Copy the following lines of code in Notepad.
net user Guest /active:no /add /passwordchg:no /passwordreq:no /logonpasswordchg:no /add /delete
net user
net localgroup
net localgroup
Replace “Guest”, and with localized names that you identified in the previous step.
You can now sign in with your newly created guest user.
Good luck and if you want more info, feel free to reply to my message.
Running lusrmgr.msc as an administrator opens the console but it is disabled: “This snapin may not be used with this edition of Windows 10”
Hi all,
My suggestion is, simply to create a user as “Guest Account” under the option “Add a user without a Microsoft account”.
I asked a question about this on the Microsoft Answers Help Forum and got a response who is tagged as a Microsoft Support Engineer. Of course the tips provided did not work. Why should I have gotten a false response even in their own forum??
Actually, this worked mint for allowing the ability for unpassworded LAN networked access to specific folders I designated. (In the advanced sharing, permissions area.) But the rest of my shared folders remains behind a locked system.
Before friends weren’t able to enter the system because ‘guest’ wasn’t enabled, once I entered in the cmd string, friends that stopped over didn’t need both wireless, AND computer access codes to access media folders.
So yeah, while the guest account itself isn’t that overly useful, it’s still quite handy for unpassworded access into network shares.
At least as of Build 15048 rs 2, it is available again… in a way. MS has changed the name from “Guest” to “Visitor”. They list how to enable it here:
http://www.laptopmag.com/articles/create-guest-account-windows-10
1. Right-click on the Windows button and select Command Prompt (Admin). This is the quickest way to open the Command Prompt as an administrator.
windows command prompt admin
2. Click Yes when asked if you want to continue.
3. Type the following command and then click Enter:
net user Visitor /add /active:yes
windows visitor command prompt
4. Press Enter twice when asked to set a password. This will create a blank password for the account.
windows visitor command prompt25. Type the following command and then hit Enter:
net localgroup users Visitor /delete
windows visitor command prompt4
This removes the Visitor user from the default users group.
6. Type the following command and then hit Enter:
net localgroup guests Visitor /add
windows visitor command prompt
This adds the Visitor user to the guests group, which is more restricted than local users.
“MS has changed the name from “Guest” to “Visitor””
That’s a goofy interpretation of the facts. Microsoft didn’t “change the name”. The steps described above simply create a whole new account, which could be named *anything* you want (except a name that already exists, of course, like “Guest”), and have always been a viable way (since all the way back to Windows XP at least, probably NT 3.5) to create a “guest” account.
Note that when following these steps, you can call the account whatever you want. If you change the “Display Name” (using e.g. the Computer Management tool) to “Guest”, then what users will see is “Guest”, even with the account name being something else.
I must have missed the point here. I have read all the sites advocating the Command Prompt method (DOS), found none of them worked, then I tried this (and it worked):
1) Click on Start and go to Settings>Accounts>Family & Other People>Add someone else to this PC
2) Click on “I don’t have this person’s sign-in information”
3) Click on “Add a user without a Microsoft account”
4) Enter “Visitor” or “Friend” or some such in the Username box. (I didn’t use “Guest” in case it clashed with some MS issue.)
5) Click on Next and you’re done.
To delete a user account the “old” way still works (Control PanelUser AccountsUser AccountsManage Accounts etc)
What was all the excitement about?
Your procedure works and it is correct. However, you create a Standard user account, with no admin rights. You don’t create the former Guest account, which is even more limited than the standard user account.
Thank you, I missed that one, and I shouldn’t have. I just needed a log in for occasional public presentations by visitors, who have had to log in to my account until now, and this is good enough. A pity, however, that Microsoft seems sometimes to make life difficult for some of us in the name of Corporate Users.
You can enable guest account . its very simple.
go to Windows Administration tools, Select local security policy, Local Policies, Then User rights assignment go down the list until you find deny log on locally. Here you will find that Guest is denied. simply select and remove Guest from the deny list and your good to go. it works flawlessly on all of my machines. Hope This helps.
This is not true. We updated the article to show why this is not true.
Thanks! This worked for me on Windows 10 Pro RS3.
Spoke too soon. The article is correct.
Hello, lets say you were in windows 7 and you had a handful of data in the guest account, like pictures, music files etc. then you decide to upgrade to windows 10. I’m in windows 10, and I realized that windows 10 doesn’t support a guest account. But some of my data was in guest. Would it be possible to retrieve the data lost?
Open File Explorer and try to go to C:UsersGuest. See if you can access it and retrieve your files.
I mean you’re right, except for the part whre you’re completly wrong about it not being doable because the ICD can enable guest logins without problems and is fully supported by MS…
I can’t even use my laptop. I’ve tried opening the guest account and it stacked there. Every time I restart or turn off, the guest account is still trying to open but it won’t. Its been weeks now. What to do? Help please
Thanks a lot for that informative and accurate article
You are welcome. Do not hesitate to subscribe to our newsletter, for more useful content.
none of the above work under Win10Home …
not for this user at least …
in fact, on a good desktop running Win10Home and using an administrator-enabled account, i can’t even run the cmd prompt as administrator either! it simply doesn’t work that way at all!
workaround: not the best solution but just create a regular user account WITHOUT administrator rights and name it something like Guest or Visitor (or whatever Winblows lets you do!) and let your guests use that account instead … (but beware not to let naughty people with hacking abilities use that account!) 😉
So, after removing Guest from the “Deny log on locally” list, and enabling the guest user in computer management, I have an account named Guest that I can log in to and get an explorer shell. I’m not sure I agree with your claim that the Guest account has been removed.
You are wrong. I was able to go to Computer Mgmt, Users+Groups. Create a new account (std User, local). Put it in the “Guest” group, then remove it from the “User” group. Login (using a password!, though it didn’t try it w/o), and it does exactly what you’d expect a guest acct to do, and nothing more – incl. no settings saved, no add’l apps created, restricted access to folders, etc.
Is it truly a guest acc’t or a std local user acc’t? Not sure. Does it matter? NO.
For all intents & purposes, this is a working guest acc’t on Win10 (x64Ent_v1803).
Great article, this explains things. Thank you!
Thanks so much for authoring this article. Really wish I had read this one first…
Unfortunately, most sites promise false things, without understanding the minor details that make a difference. Also, some people that read this article, ignore my arguments as falsehoods and do not get that this feature is gone. I wish that Microsoft had published a blog post on this topic and explained things for everyone.
Hi Ciprian. Not sure if you are the right one to ask. I have set up a local user “ChromeOnly” on Windows10 via the commandlines you provided above, so removed this user from the localgroup “users” via “net localgroup users ChromeOnly /delete” but I ommitted the adding of this user ChromeOnly to the localgroup guests via “net localgroup guests ChromeOnly /add”. In other words, the user “ChromeOnly” is not member of any localgroup.
With this user “ChromeOnly” I’m running the Google Chrome browser via:
runas /user:ChromeOnly “C:Program Files (x86)GoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe”
All seems to be working fine.
Question: is a user that is not member of any localgroup even more secure than a user that is only member of the localgroup “guests”?
“Unfortunately, there are websites that lie to you for a bit of traffic and a quick buck.”
.
Out of all the forums and the websites, this one nailed it in the head. I dislike finding tons of search results only to realize they omitted a vital info and pretty much is useless. It’s a good thing I found this site, thank you. ^_^
(continuation)
I guess now, I need to find a way to make a standard account be restricted much like a guest account.
Nice, thanks! Saved me from a bunch of headaches.
On Build 1903 released in march Going through the following steps does enable the guest account
with a combination of all the options and then of course changing the privileges and setting a password the Guest Account does enable. I set my guest account as my second administrator to use the default accounts of windows.
Thanks for guiding, else I was also following those misguided articles.
I’m afraid you made a mistake. Method 1 (creating an account in guest groups) does actually create a guest account. An account in this group can’t access settings, can’t change their password (since they cant run settings), or install software to their profile such as store apps. They also can’t run OneDrive. The profile in control panel (under user profiles) always lists them as temporary. However the only thing it doesn’t replicate is the ability to delete files automatically at log off, though I think this was also the case with windows 8?
I was more than happy to uncover this great site. I need to to thank you for your time due to this fantastic read!! I definitely enjoyed every bit of it and I have you bookmarked to see new information on your blog.
Don’t you just love it when someone says “it doesn’t work as of 2015, and it won’t work in all future version”?
How can you POSSIBLY know what “all future versions” of Windows will/won’t support?
Do you know all about Windows 10 version 2030 too?
Because this is the official plan, and so far nothing has changed about this feature.
thank you Ciprian , very useful contribution !
Hi I know this is an old article but Microsoft have actually “fixed” the built in guest account a couple of years ago. If you log in to it, it no longer crashes and can be used without errors. I first tried it on Windows 2004 version but it may have been fixed earlier? The built in guest account is very slightly more restricted than another account in the guest group. For example:
1. You cant sign in to any app, even Edge Chromium or Office. You get an error.
2. The Windows Security app wont work, so you cant do a manual scan with Defender.
3. Some Powershell programs don’t run. They bring up an error
4. Even if network and sharing is disabled, it seems the built in guest account totally ignores this setting and makes you PC visible! This is a serious security issue if you were connecting to say a public WIFI. I suspect this is why it was disabled!
5. The start menu, search and notifications don’t work. This means if you want to run a program you have to search for it manually via File Explorer (not very useful!) I don’t know if this is by design, or if its a bug?
6. The power button doesn’t work. Therefore to sign out or switch off, you have to press CTRL+ALT+DEL.