Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Faster User Switching

I run several Vista machines each with several user accounts. Sometimes the different accounts are for different people, sometimes they are for different purposes with different permissions (ie development vs testing). Windows XP introduced a featured called "Fast User Switching" that allowed you to log into another user account without logging off the current session and Vista improves on this by allowing it in domain environments too.

But it's not enough. I want it to be faster. At the moment, in Vista, it takes far too many key presses or mouse clicks to switch to another user. This is the quickest method I've discovered so far:

Ctrl+Alt+Del, Alt+W, select account, enter password, Enter.

However, I recently discovered a much faster approach. I bought a new laptop with Vista and a built-in Vista-driver-compatible fingerprint reader. Now I've associated different fingers with different accounts and at any time I can just slide the appropriate finger over the reader and *bam*, I'm logged into another account.

Still, if anyone knows, a better keyboard shortcut would be great for the PCs without fingerprint readers.

Thursday, September 06, 2007 12:03:54 AM (Cen. Australia Standard Time, UTC+09:30)
Have you tried Windows Logo Key + L?
Mehrdad Afshari
Thursday, September 06, 2007 7:50:10 AM (Cen. Australia Standard Time, UTC+09:30)
Hi Mehrdad,

I regularly use Win+L to lock my machine before I walk away. For switching users it is a similar pattern to that in my post:

Win+L, Alt+W, select account, enter password, Enter.

However, it seems that when I use Win+L first instead of Ctrl+Alt+Del, there is excess hard drive activity when I type Alt+W. I believe some of the changes coming in Vista SP1 are supposed to improve that performance but for now, while the number of key presses is the same, Win+L takes longer.

Regards,
Thursday, September 06, 2007 9:14:44 PM (Cen. Australia Standard Time, UTC+09:30)
But Win+L does not need Alt+W, and when I press Alt+W after Ctrl+Alt+Del, it also takes the same time to show Welcome screen. :-? No idea! :-?? since I'm also a fingerprint addict!
Mehrdad Afshari
Sunday, September 09, 2007 2:40:45 PM (Cen. Australia Standard Time, UTC+09:30)
I think the behaviour of Win+L varies between domain and non-domain computers.
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