Set up a Guest Account

If you frequently have fleeting visitors in your home, you may wish to provide a limited user experience for basic tasks such as browsing the web. For reasons unknown to us, Microsoft has disabled the Guest account, but it’s relatively straightforward to get back, and the quickest way is via the Command Prompt. To create a guest account named Visitor, and assign it to the Guest account group, first right-click the “Start” button, choose “Command Prompt ( Admin),” then type the following:

$ net user Visitor /add /active:yes $ net user Visitor *

Press [Enter] twice when prompted to add a password, so it stays blank. Now type:

$ net localgroup users Visitor /delete $ net localgroup guests Visitor /add

The first command removes the Visitor account group (all new accounts are allocated their own group of the same name), while the second then assigns it to the Guest group. Yes, despite the fact that Microsoft has removed the Guest account, it has kept the Guest group alive, which basically offers exactly the same level of limited accessibility as the Guest account provided in earlier versions of Windows.

Once complete, your guests can be directed to the Visitor account. They can use a limited set of apps, but will be denied access to other parts of your system, such as Settings and the Microsoft Store. You can still install desktop programs, however— with the requisite Admin password and/or PIN, of course.