You probably know how it feels when you jump into your car to find the seat in the wrong position, the mirrors out of line and the radio tuned to some obscure foreign station—that's pretty-much what happens when you let a friend use your PC.
In the immortal words of Benny Hill "a friend in need is a bloody nuisance".
At least once a week, I hear from people who find themselves automatically logging-in to the wrong (Hotmail/Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Skype) account or are missing familiar icons or have unwanted software booting-up.
In most cases, these issues are no more than a nuisance though I often see PCs which require a 'clean' Windows installation due to corruption by malicious software—there is little point in having good Internet Security protection if the user ignores the warnings that it generates.
Fortunately, it is very easy to avoid the problem of unruly guests moving your PC 'furniture' about—all recent version of Windows allow you to open multiple user accounts which each have their own desktop, filing system, email accounts and so forth.
Each user account can be password protected and may also be given 'administrator' privileges, if required, which allows changes to other user accounts, including password changes—I suggest that you reserve 'administrator' privileges for yourself alone.
Precise instructions vary with Windows version and setup but you generally start by going to the 'Control Panel' and selecting 'User Accounts'.
Repairing a corrupt Windows system is a fairly 'hit and miss' affair while re-building from scratch, though not especially difficult, can be pretty time-consuming due to large numbers of software updates and the need to get everything set-up just as you like it.
Then there is the issue of recovering data from the corrupt system as this will inevitably be erased by a fresh Windows installation.
For a simple answer to this particular problem, see our article entitled Avoid Windows-pain with regular backups
And keep your PC setup as you like it by providing your guests with separate user accounts.
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