XP Home - Fast User Switching

[kevinthenerd]

My girlfriend, roommate, friend and I use the same computer, but we use four separate accounts on it to keep all our stuff separated with different preferences and whatnot. Is there a way to disable fast user switching for some accounts but not all? My roommate always leaves her account "switched" instead of "logged off." She doesn't use the computer often enough to justify this, but when she does, it's annoying to have nothing really open but to have extra resources eaten up by antivirus and whatnot, only to be freed up by logging into her account and logging her off completely. On the other hand, my girlfriend and I switch accounts all the time because we don't want to disrupt eachother's school work just to look something up real quick. It would be silly, for example, to close my Modeling Methods homework (applied numerical methods programming for ME's) for her to look up a movie we're about to go see, and it would be stupid for me to close her Word document just to use wikipedia to looksomething up. I've considered using one account, but our preference differences are unreconcilable. For example, I like Firefox extentions that she truly hates. We have a bunch of passwords saved and stuff.


CLIFF NOTES:
4 users, 1 machine, XP Home
Can I disable fast user switching for just one of them but leave it enabled for the other three?


Edit:

I decided to just log her off manually. There MIGHT be a way to script it so that her account can't stay active for more than a couple of hours, but knowing me, I'll screw it up and close it while she's using it.

 

[Shawn]

Pretty sure that you can't.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: Shawn
Pretty sure that you can't.

I agree.

However, it's likely the resources being consumed may not be as bad as you think.

Open apps and the user session will consume some memory and anything that is left "doing something" will consume CPU. Unless she leaves something crunching numbers running I'm betting most of her apps are idle and not really consuming CPU.

Antivirus is a driver that consumes some cpu cycles as files are opened but since nobody is actively doing something under that session AV will not be doing much.

Memory is the only resource that should really be getting tapped by the idle session and after you and the Mrs log on and start using a few things, most of your roomates stuff will start getting paged out to disk leaving your physical memory free.