Windows 7 Control Panel Users different from Windows Explorer Users?

[BudVitoff]

At my age I'm not keen on climbing stairs, so I'm experimenting with transferring files from the PC laptop in the kitchen to/from the PC desktop upstairs. TeamViewer is working fine, and both machines are now in the same home group, for whatever that buys me. Both machines are Win7 SP1. Today I ran across something I don't understand.

When I look at the upstairs Control Panel User Accounts, I see my daughter Holly as an administrator and a turned-off Guest account -- nothing more. When I look at the Users in Windows Explorer though, I see Owner and Public. What's going on?

 

[Neemobeer]

Guest is a special account that doesn't have a profile in C:\Users and it's generally disabled. There is also a built-in Administrator account which is also disabled by default. Public is not really a user, but items added in that folder are available to all users and it requires admin rights to modify. If you are looking at the computer remotely you may not be able to even see user "Holly" unless specifically given Read rights to it, or it has to do with the way homegroups work which isn't something I'm very familiar with. That or Holly is just the display name and "Owner" is really the account

 

[BIGBEARJEDI]

@Bud: You may already be somewhat aware of how Homegroups work in Win7/8x/10, but they combine the best features of P2P (Peer-to-Peer networking) and LAN networking. There are some very good tutorials on the Homegroup networking features which were developed with the advent of Windows7. Here's a good one: Windows Networking: The Basic Concepts in Network Sharing.

@Neemo: One of the biggest reasons that people use Homegroups (used to be Workgroups) in home networks is the concept of P2P sharing over a LAN is really a "server-less" technology concept. Few home users have the expertise, knowledge or willingness to build their own network server and the time and effort that it takes to maintain it. As you're no doubt aware, Domain account management is full-time job in a business with 5 or more computers in their network. Most home users have no desire to be spending 40 hrs. a week handling all the complexities of moving computers around on the LAN, repairing those computers, and managing networks, protocol topology issues, etc. Homegroups seeks to simplify this for the average home user, and does a pretty good job IMO. Not perfect, but pretty good.

<<<BIGBEARJEDI>>>

 

[CmdrKeene]

Guest is a special account that doesn't have a profile in C:\Users and it's generally disabled. There is also a built-in Administrator account which is also disabled by default. Public is not really a user, but items added in that folder are available to all users and it requires admin rights to modify. If you are looking at the computer remotely you may not be able to even see user "Holly" unless specifically given Read rights to it, or it has to do with the way homegroups work which isn't something I'm very familiar with. That or Holly is just the display name and "Owner" is really the account

I'm pretty sure the Owner folder is her account's storage folder. You should be able to see the user folders all enumerated (listed) by default. Also "Owner" is the name commonly used by OEM manufacturers like HP/Compaq/Dell because they use scripted setup templates (part of the same routine that runs their own custom OOBE process and installing the pre-installed junk). Afterwards you get to pick a user account name (Holly) but the folder name can't be changed unless you actually create a new account.

Basically it sounds like this situation isn't super unexpected. Of course, navigate inside the folder to check, but it sounds very likely that Holly's files are in the "Owner" file folder. Public is likely empty but it's just a shared folder similar to the "All Users" folder on previous versions of Windows. If you were to turn on the Guest account, you'd probably see "Holly", "Public", and "Guest".

 

[Henry Wong]

I agree with Neemobeer and CmdrKeene. You can always check to see what the user profile directory is by loging in as the user and going to command prompt. It starts in the user directory.