Who Am I? (All About User Accounts Plus a Bonus Tip)
These tips are for Windows 10, but they should work on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, also.
Would you like to find out the name of the user account you’re logged into Windows with?
Here’s how:
Open a command prompt. In Windows 10 type CMD in taskbar search and press Enter when Command prompt appears.
At the prompt type WHOAMI (as in who am I). Windows will respond with your computer name and your user account. It may be different than what you think. My main user account on this computer is Rocky 10 (a movie they never made) and I’m logged in as user odumh (don’t even ask).
Now, for the next tip, I’m switching to a different computer where I have a lot of user accounts set up.
To see a list of all the accounts on your computer, open an Administrator Command prompt this way:
Type CMD in taskbar search. When the Command prompt appears at the top of the search results, right-click on it and choose “Run as administrator” from the right-click menu.
In the Command window at the prompt type:
NET USER
And press Enter.
You’ll see all the accounts on your computer, including the hidden ones.
My second (backup) laptop is called Sydney28 (it’s a long story). You can see I have several other user accounts on Sydney28 with names like “BeMyGuest”, Jupiter, rainc, Reddington and thunder (Thunder Cloud) and some arcane accounts that were created by Windows.
If you have an inquiring mind, you probably want to know why they are there.
WDAGUtilityAccount — Microsoft defines the “WDAGUtilityAccount” this way: “this account is part of the Windows Defender Application Guard which came with the Fall Creators Update (version 1709). This account is left disabled unless it (Windows Defender Application Guard) is enabled on your device.”
DefaultAccount — It’s probably not what you think it is. It’s not your default user account. According to Microsoft’s arcane definition: “The DefaultAccount, also known as the Default System Managed Account (DSMA), is a built-in account introduced in Windows 10 version 1607 and Windows Server 2016. The DMSA is a well-known user account type. It is a user-neutral account that can be used to run processes that are either multi-user aware or user-agnostic…” hmmm!
Administrator — this is the famous, so-called hidden Super Administrator account. And while it does have some important uses, you should never enable it and then leave it enabled. If you want to enable it to try it you can do so this way:
Open an Administrator Command prompt and type:
NET USER ADMINISTRATOR /ACTIVE:YES
Now press Enter. You’ll get a message that “The command has completed successfully”
Once you’ve enabled it, to use it you’ll need to log out of your account and log into the “Super Administrator” account.
Don’t forget to turn it off when you’re done experimenting: Open an administrator Command prompt and type:
NET USER ADMINISTRATOR /ACTIVE:NO
Press Enter. You should see “The command completed successfully”.
And one more tip: If you have more than one user account — that you created — you can switch between them by using the Windows key + L shortcut. Try it!