Wanting to create standard user and deny seeing main account's files.

Shinryus · 28 Jan 2015

Hello, I want to create a standard user and deny him seeing files on the main account on the computer.

I am using windows 7.

Basically one hard drive will have the main account(set to administrator) and another account for a friend to use(set to standard).

I do not want the standard user to see files on the administrator at all but ran into problems.

The administrator can have a file named "bank account" and the standard user can search on the start menu "bank account" and actually see the file! This goes for pictures, music, and other files I do not want the standard user to see or even access.

How do I fix this?

Tookeri · 28 Jan 2015

One way to do it(from the main account) is to go into properties, security tab for folder c:\users\username where username is your main account. Click the Edit button and then Add the second user account. Then check Deny. When you check the first box "Full Control" it will set all others as Deny.

There may be other and better ways to do this as it's better to change the read access to only certain account types than to deny a certain account, but the above solution is fast and good enough as long as you continue to add deny restrictions for any additional standard accounts you create.

PS. On my current PC standard users don't have read access to my "main" account, and I've haven't done anything to set that up. I think that's the default behavior. Maybe someone knows more and can explain?

Alejandro85 · 28 Jan 2015

The default security permissions are precisely what you need, files in a user folder aren't accessible to others, as long as they remain under the user profile (c:\users\<username>). My best bet would be that the files aren't actually on those private areas, but instead into the shared folders (c:\users\all users) which has full permissions for everyone.

Another option is that the permissions have been altered at some point, which could let someone else access even to private areas.