Chapter 4 - Managing Windows XP Professional

Abstract

This chapter discusses the concepts of managing Windows XP Professional. It explores creating users and groups in XP. This is an administration task required to manage permissions on a local Windows XP machine. Instead of creating new users and groups, one can use the built-in accounts, such as administrator and guest. The built-in users and groups have predefined permissions. The permissions assigned to these accounts by default in addition to how and when to change the defaults is examined in the chapter. It discusses how to make shared folders and when to use them. It touches on managing storage and devices. This includes topics such as basic disks, dynamic disks, volumes, partitions, and file systems. Troubleshooting by using the event viewer and performance logs are discussed in the chapter. Every time the Windows XP machine is used, a valid user account to log in and access the local machine must be provided. This user account must have the appropriate permissions to use the machine or the access will be denied. One can assign permissions directly to the user account or can assign them to groups. When assigning permissions to groups, all the users within the group are affected.