The importance of individual accounts

- If you share a computer with others, it's a good idea for each user to have their own account. Everyone having their own account is better for security reasons. For instance no one can access anyone else's account without their password. But it's also good for personal organization of everyone's files. Meaning your files won't be mixed in with everyone else's files. All modern operating systems with the exception of some mobile operating systems, allow you to create individual accounts for each separate user of that computer. In Windows 10, for example, you can create new user accounts by going to the start menu, opening settings, going to accounts, and selecting family and other users. And from here, you can add a family member if for instance, you want to add an account for a kid that you can monitor, or you can choose add someone else to this PC to create an individual user account for someone who's not part of your family. I'll just close that for now. So again the point of having individual accounts is that each account on the computer is password protected so only the individual user can access to that account, which in turn provides more security for everyone else's files. Each user has their own user folder on the computer. Let's see how to get to that user folder so we can take a closer look at it. Now there are faster ways to get to some of the folders inside your user folder than what I'm about to show you. But I also want you to see exactly where this folder is located. So bear with me. Currently I don't have any windows or any applications running. I'm going to open up File Explorer by clicking this icon here in the task bar. And then in the left sidebar of the window that opens under this PC, I'm going to select local disc. This local disc labeled the C drive is my main or startup hard drive containing the operating system and other important folders. Now most of these folders you see here are for the windows operating systems use, and you generally don't want to mess around in them unless you know what you're doing. But this is also where you'll find the user's folder. I'll double click it to open it. In the user's folder, you'll find a folder for each account on your computer with the user's name on it, or whatever the name of the account is. To view the contents of your user folder, double click it. So again your user folder is your folder. It's where you can store all of your documents, music, photos, videos, and so on. Now you can store files in other parts of your hard drive, but there are very few reasons to do that. It's best to keep all of your personal files here in your user folder so they're all in one central location. You're also free to create additional folders in your user folder or within any of these default folders as your needs require. Anytime you're using an application and you want to save a file, for example, if you're writing a paper and you want to save it, you should navigate to your documents folder, or into a folder you have nested inside the documents folder. If you're saving photos, save them to your pictures folder. And so on. This keeps everything organized and in one central location for each individual user on the computer. Notice you can quickly access these folders from the left sidebar as well. I can click on documents to get to my documents folder, or music to get to my music folder. To set up a faster way to get to your user folder, you can click the start menu to go back to settings. Here's like the personalization, and choose start. Then click choose which folders appear on start. From here you can choose which of your personal folders will show up in the start menu. So if you often need to open the document folder, you can make sure documents is enabled here. But I actually prefer to enable the personal folder, which is another name for your user folder. So if I close this now, when I click the start menu, notice we can now find personal folder. And that way I can get to all of my folders quickly without cluttering up my start menu too much. So that's your user folder in Windows. Again I highly recommend that you store and organize all of your personal files and other media in this location.