If you have a guest over who would like to use your computer to access their email or Facebook or cruise the internet, you can ensure that they don’t accidentally  or intentionally breach your privacy. By activating a Guest account for them you can give your guest a safely limited account that won’t allow system changes. Additionally, you can protect the administrator’s account and any other account with a password.

Enabling a guest account helps draw a line between browser preferences, history and bookmarks, and personal files, and other system settings.

To activate the Guest account, Click the Start button, then Control Panel and find Users, User Accounts or, as in Windows 7, “User Accounts and Family Safety”.  Click on “Add or remove user accounts” and find the Guest account.  If it is off, click the icon to turn it on.

Now that you have an active Guest account, here is a very simple yet effective method to let your Guests access your computer without the fear of exposing your personal documents and files. Furthermore, this method could be used to limit access to folders for just about any user and not only the Guest users.

Step 1: Make sure you are logged in to an administrator account. Right-click on any folder you want to block from Guest users and open the Properties window.

Step 2: In the folder property window, open the Security tab and click on the Edit button to change the permission settings.

Step 3: You will see a list of groups and users of your system. As there’s no privilege level defined for Guest user here, click on the Add button to include the Guest user.

Step 4: In the Select Users or Groups window write down guest in the text box below enter the object names to select and click on the button Check Names. Windows will now check for the user or group name for its existence. Once the window has identified the user, click on the Ok button.

Step 5: Now select the Guest user in the list, and check deny on the permissions you want to revoke from the user and click Ok.

Step 6: Windows will ask you for your confirmation by a Security Warning dialog box. Click on Yes and wait for Windows to change attributes for the files.

From now on, if a guest user tries to access a folder, you’ve denied them permission to access the folder so they will be prompted to enter the admin password.