Set up a Guest Account

If you're like me you never do anything important without bringing a backup laptop. Sometimes someone may want to borrow that laptop. Here's how you can do that safely.

If you got Control Panel and type in Add or Remove, you should see the option for 'Add or remove user accounts'. Click on this and you'll see an option for a Guest account, which you can turn an off.

You then want to restrict which folders the guest account has access to. You can prevent the guest user from accessing any data saved on your C drive, by right clicking on the drive, selecting Properties, and going to the Security tab. On this tab you'll see a list of user names. Select the guest account and then click Edit.

. . . a new window will open and you'll see you have the option to either grant or deny the guest user full control of a folder or more specific modify or read rights.

RAMMap

You can get an analysis of how your Windows operating system's RAM is being used by downloading and installing RAMMap, a free program available here.

As you can see it breaks down how much RAM is being used by the Kernel (the core of the operating system, which loads first during start up and controls the rest of the system); Mapped Files (files which are assigned memory byte for byte in order to increase performance); Page Table (used to map the virtual address that accessing processes use to get the actual physical address of data - which can be dispersed); Process Private (memory that isn't shared amongst processes); and Paged & NonPage Pool (pool data is kept ready to use, rather than being acquired when it's requested, - paged data may come from a secondary source.)

If you click on the Priority Summary you can see how much memory pressure your system in under. If there is a lot of re-purposed memory with a priority between 5 and 7, there will be significant memory pressure on the system. Memory pressure is a better way of measuring how muchstress your system is under than how much free RAM is available, since keeping more than a few MB of RAM is wasteful.

Windows Event Viewer

In Windows 7 if you to Start and type in 'Event Viewer', an application will launch that will allow you to track all login attempts to your PC.

In the Event Viewer menu list, select Windows Log and expand the folder tree. Select security. This will show you a log of events on your PC, and 'Date and Time' field will allow you to easily tell whenever someone has had your PC on.

Note that you may see entries with the Task Category of 'Logon' and with a note of 'An account was successfully logged on' on the General tab in the pane at the bottom, even when the someone has not successfully logged on and entered the correct password to access the system.

If you click on the 'System' icon in the tree, and scroll to find 'Error' level records, you'll be able to find notes reading, "currently configured password due to the following error: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password." on the general tab. A good way to pinpoint when an unauthorized person was trying to access your PC.