Popping In and Out

If you’ve got more than one user who uses your computer, you may have run into the problem of several people wanting to use it at once. Sometimes one person will be using the computer, and another needs to check on something quickly - check his email, look up a contact’s phone number, grab a file off the hard drive. Or perhaps the first user is doing something with sensitive information that the second user shouldn’t be able to access, meaning that the first guy needs to stand and supervise the second as they do what’s needed in a new browser window or log out so that the sensitive information is protected.

This could all be a big ordeal if the original user has to quit everything, log out, wait for the next user to log in, find their information, log out, log the first user back in so she can pick up where she left off. Luckily, Apple’s given us a way to make this process quick and easy. For some reason, this is another great feature that was talked about a lot when it was first introduced, and then a lot of people forgot about it and newer users have never even heard of it. So, today, let’s look at Fast User Switching.

Fast User Switching allows multiple users to be logged in at once without their applications and information getting all tangled up. This solves all of the problems for our hypothetical folks in the introduction because person two can just quickly switch over to his account, get what he needs, and be out of there, and the first user’s applications and documents are all still open in her account where she left off.

To use Fast User Switching, first you need to turn it on because it’s not on by default. You’ll need to be logged into an Administrator account to do this - if you’re not sure whether you are, you can follow along and try this. If you’re not an admin, it will tell you!

Open up the System Preferences pane, and select Accounts. Once you’re in Accounts, look for the button labeled “Login Options” (circled here in red).

After you’ve clicked “Login Options,” the above pane will be visible (at this point, if you’re not an Admin, it won’t let you click “Login Options”). Just check “Enable fast user switching” (indicated here by the fat black arrow). Once you’ve done that, you can choose how the user shows up in the switching menu with the “View as:” menu. Your options are full user name, short user name, and user icon. After you’ve decided that, you’re all set - you can close the System Preferences.

Now, when you want to switch, you can go to the menu at the upper right corner of the screen that’s labeled with your name (or short name, or icon…). Select the account you’d like to switch to from the dropdown menu:

As soon as you select another account, you’ll see the screen shift to the selected account. If that account is password protected, it will ask for that user’s password; otherwise, it will shift without question. You can move back to the first account the same way.

There are a couple notes to remember when using fast user switching:

• Things that you leave open when you switch out of your account aren’t accessible to other accounts as long as there’s a password on the account (except for administrator accounts that might have access to the whole system). When there is a password on the account, other users can’t switch into the account without the password.
• When you switch out of the account, applications you were using are still open in the background - this is two pronged. On the one hand, it means you won’t lose information you were working on or any of your application windows unless the computer is shut down. On the other, this means that it could start to slow down your computer if you have many applications open all the time in many accounts.
• Some applications have special settings for Fast User Switching. For example, one of the iChat preferences allows you to decide whether iChat should log out when you are switched “out” of your account.