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I am the only user on my PC, what is the techinical differnce between locking it and switching user?

Does one of the options do a better job of preventing internet connection disruptions (p2p)?

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    If you lock the computer your user is still logged in. If you switch the user then you are logged out.
    – Ramhound
    Jun 2, 2015 at 13:21
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    @Ramhound - not necessarily... "If you have more than one user account on your computer, Fast User Switching is an easy way for another person to log on to the computer without logging you off or closing your programs and files." - windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/…
    – Kinnectus
    Jun 2, 2015 at 13:26

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Lock and Switch User should not affect your currently logged-in account because those currently logged-in sessions are still running. Windows just secures them so that unauthorised users cannot access them.

When you Lock your computer Windows secures the session and you are then prompted to enter your password to log in again to the session you were still running.

Switch User goes one step further by securing the previous session (as in when you Lock the computer) but it creates a new session that the additional user logs in to and the previous (now Locked) session is kept in memory.

According to an article there is no hard limit to the number of Fast User Switching sessions but the machine resources will soon saturate and performance will become degraded (source).

Regarding your question as to whether one or the other will affect Internet connection disruptions then, I believe, because only one session can be running at any one time, then the answer should be no, it should not affect network usage.

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