Multiple Login's / Session on Win XP:

[Waaib]

I'm not sure what this is called.

In Mac you can have more than one person logged onto a machine at one time and switch sessions between users.

Is the same thing available for Windows XP?

As usual freeware / open source preferred.

 

[masticore]

This exists in Windows XP. IIRC, it's called User Switching. It allows multiple accounts to be logged into the machine at any one time. Obviously, only one of those logged in accounts can be active at a time. If your XP installation is connected to a domain, then I don't think the functionality is available - it's more a home oriented capability.

EDIT: to test if an XP installation supports user switching, just press WinKey + L. If the screen that appears provides a list of logins to use, then it's enabled.

 

[Waaib]

Thanks. My intention is to run two people logged in at the same time.

One will be my normal day to day work.

The other is a VMware session running a Windows server.

 

[masticore]

Windows machines typically only support 1 user at a time. The use of VMWare can make another machine available, but you'd need to connect to it somehow - like through VNC or RDP or somesuch. This would, obviously, require the use of another machine ... so I have to ask why you'd want to run 2 people off 1 machine when you have 2 machines?

 

[Waaib]

Maybe I'm not explaining myself clearly.

What I want to do is have one 'session' running with my day-to-day work and then another session with the VM stuff on it ...

 

[Random717]

Then this is what you're looking for:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/279765

 

[ld13]

Maybe I'm not explaining myself clearly.

No no, it's quite clear to me. I also went looking for an answer to this a few months back for some dodge thing I wanted to try - can't remember why anymore.

The answer that I got was this was not possible as XP was never made to act as a multi user server. M$ Server 2003 etc etc was more for this. The nearest thing I could find was This & This hack that allows multiple Remote Desktop connections to one PC.

Brainwave - Can one RD into your own PC? If that is the case, then the above hack could well be the answer to your problem

Then this is what you're looking for:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/279765

Thats not what he is looking for. Whatever is running in the other User session, gets frozen when switching users afaik. Thus it's kinda useless if I understand what he is trying to do here.

 

[Waaib]

thanks folks. Gonna pa a visit to zastore.co.za now ...

 

[ld13]

Zastore, why?

 

[Claymore]

Thats not what he is looking for. Whatever is running in the other User session, gets frozen when switching users afaik. Thus it's kinda useless if I understand what he is trying to do here.

Eh? No, logged on sessions carry on running in the background. It works very nicely, I've found.

 

[ld13]

Eh? No, logged on sessions carry on running in the background. It works very nicely, I've found.

The last time I tried this, the internet connection to that session died...not exactly the kind of solution I was looking for.

 

[Claymore]

The last time I tried this, the internet connection to that session died...not exactly the kind of solution I was looking for.

If it was a dial-up connection, it's designed to drop the connection on user switch by default, but you can set it not to.