Tips for multiple user accounts

I still have a PC in the house that the wife uses. She's not a power user at all but she hates change. I means HATES. I've switched over to a MacBook Pro for 95% of my computing although I still use the PC for some things (such as supporting apps that don't have suitable OS X equivalent like Quicken).

On the PC, she uses Internet Explorer and I use Firefox. The advantage is that we have separate sets of bookmarks and more importantly cookies (We can each go straight to sites like Facebook without having to logout/login).

I'm planning to buy a new iMac soon to replace the PC and will install VM Fusions to keep Windows available. That said, I'm thinking of setting up multiple users on the new machine, but I've never done that before. I'm not worried so much about the mechanics but the subtleties. I'm looking for gotcha's or specific things that would be helpful to know before setting this up (I may decide not to if the gains aren't worth it).

Other random thoughts:

• My wife currently has nothing Apple so she doesn't have an Apple ID. Is this important?
• If I buy an app from the Mac Store, is it automatically available to all users?
• If we both use Safari under separate accounts, can I safely assume that each would have separate cookies, bookmarks etc...
• Are there reasons why separate user accounts would be a Bad idea?

lrd said:

Other random thoughts:

• My wife currently has nothing Apple so she doesn't have an Apple ID. Is this important?
• If I buy an app from the Mac Store, is it automatically available to all users?
• If we both use Safari under separate accounts, can I safely assume that each would have separate cookies, bookmarks etc...
• Are there reasons why separate user accounts would be a Bad idea?

Click to expand...

1) No Apple ID - no problem. Just let her use yours (that is what my wife does) when/if she wants to purchase APPs, Music, Books, Movies etc. That way you can both share them on multiple devices
2) As long as you install it in the Shared Applications Folder (which s normally the default location) yes, any APP will be available to all
3) I have had multiple user accounts on every Mac I have owned (5 and counting) and have never noticed any bleed-thru or crosstalk on Safari or any other Browser, or anything else for that matter to include Mail
4) Off-hand I can't think of any reason or situation where multiple accounts would be a problem. There may be, but I've never run into one

ditto to all the above.

In fact I would suggest creating a third user account strictly for troubleshooting. Make it an administrator account. If an app is behaving badly you can log into that account and see if the app runs properly.