To view user and group information in windows, we're going to use the computer management tool if we search computer management in our application search and open it up, we'll see a window that gives us a lot of information. We'll be using this application a lot throughout this course, so let's take some time to go over it. At the top of the sidebar, you'll see it says computer management local. This means we're managing a single machine locally. In an enterprise environment, you can manage multiple machines in something called a domain. A Windows domain is a network of computers, users, files, et cetera, that are added to a central database. If you're an admin of that domain, you can view those accounts and computers from any machine in the domain. We'll learn more about domains and how to manage them in our next course on system administration and IT infrastructure services. Underneath this menu, we have system tools. Let's do a run down of each of these sub menus. Task Scheduler: This lets you schedule programs and tasks to run at certain times, like automatically shutting off the computer at 11:00 pm every night. Event Viewer: This is where our system stores its system logs. We'll do a deep dive on this tool in an upcoming lesson. Shared folders: This shows the folders that different users on the machine share with each other. Remember how he said that other users can't view anyone else's files? That's not exactly true. If users store files on a shared folder, anyone who has access to that folder can view it. Local Users and Groups: This is where we'll be doing our user and group management. Performance: This shows monitoring for the resources of our machine like CPU and RAM. Device Manager: This is where we go to manage devices to our computer like our network cards, sound cards, monitors, and more. Under the storage menu, we have a sub menu for disk management. We use this when we talk about discs in a later lesson. Finally, the services and applications menu shows us the programs and services that we have available on the system. We can choose to enable or disable services like DNS here. All the essential settings that we as administrators need to change are found in the computer management tool. If you're a power user it's more efficient to use this than it is to go through the default settings application. Okay, let's get back to the task at hand. Let's see what kind of user account we have and what groups we're a part of. Let's go back to the local users and groups. Under users, we can see a few built in Windows accounts like guest and administrator. The local administrator account lets you log in using the administrator username and whatever the administrator password is on the computer. This account is disabled by default. Since this account has unfettered access on the computer, it can be dangerous to be logged into it at all times. For now, let's look at the account I'm in. Cindy, let's double click on this to see more information. Okay, let's do a rundown here. Under the tab general, we can see some basic information about the user along with some options. User must change password at next logon. Since I'm an admin, I can force other users to change their password. This is useful if I'm managing someone's account and their password was compromised. We don't want to risk someone else logging into their account, so we force them to change their password. User cannot change password. Password never expires. Account is disabled. Enabling or disabling an account means making it active or inactive. Account is locked out. This means a user account will not be able to log in. Maybe a disgruntled employee is looking to do malicious things. We can make it so that they won't be able to log into their computer. Under the member of tab, we can see which groups we're part of. I can see that I'm in the administrators group. Heads up that instead of being logged into a local administrator account all the time, you can be logged into your own account and use administrative powers when you need to. This is thanks to the help of UAC or user access control. This is a feature in Windows that prevents unauthorized changes to a system. These changes have to be approved by the administrator instead. Since I'm an administrator, I would do is enter in my password to confirm that I want to make a change. Finally, on the last tab, profile, you can change settings about your user profile, like where you want your home folder to be. This isn't terribly important on a local account, but it comes in handy when you're managing many users on a domain. Now if we go to the groups menu on the sidebar, it should look familiar. Just like the member tab, we can view which groups are available and who their members are. And that's how you view user and group information using the Windows GUI. Next, let's take a look at how to do the exact same thing using Windows-
