Читать книгу Windows 11 All-in-One For Dummies - Ciprian Adrian Rusen - Страница 82

In addition to administrator and standard accounts (and child accounts, which are a subset of standard accounts), Microsoft has another pair of account types: Microsoft accounts, and local (also known as offline) accounts. You can have an administrator account that’s a Microsoft account or a standard account that’s a Microsoft account or an administrator account that’s a local account, and so on.

The basic differentiation goes like this:

 Microsoft accounts are registered with an email address. Most people use their @hotmail.com or @live.com or @outlook.com email addresses. Still, you can register any email address as a Microsoft account (details in the next chapter). Also, Microsoft accounts must have a password.When you log in to Windows 11 with a Microsoft account, Windows goes out to Microsoft’s servers in the cloud and verifies your password and then pulls down some of your Windows 11 settings and transfers them to the PC you just logged in to. You can control which settings get synced in the Settings app (click or tap the start icon, Settings, Accounts, and then Windows Backup), as shown in Figure 4-3.If you change, say, your display language, the next time you log in to Windows 11 — from any machine, anywhere in the world — you see Windows in the new language. More than that, if the Microsoft account is set up to do so, you can get immediate access to all your email, OneDrive storage, and other Windows 11 features without logging in again.

 Local accounts are regular, old-fashioned accounts that exist only on your PC. They don’t save or retrieve your settings from Microsoft’s computers. Such accounts may or may not have a password.

FIGURE 4-3: Control which Windows 11 settings are synced across your Microsoft account.

On a single PC, administrator accounts can add new users, delete existing users, or change the password of any local account on the computer. They can’t change the password of any Microsoft accounts.

Microsoft accounts are undeniably more convenient than local (offline) accounts. Sign in to Windows 11 with your Microsoft account, and many of your apps will just realize who you are, pull in your email, sync your storage, and much more. On the other hand, using a Microsoft account means that Microsoft has a log of many of your interactions with your PC — when you signed in, how you used the Microsoft apps (including Edge), Bing search results, and so on. See Book 2, Chapter 5 for more about Microsoft accounts.