Should I use a local account or not?

Hello!

I can't decide whether to use a local account or sign in to my Live account.
I feel a little paranoid soetimes and I feel unsafe when being logged in to my live account all the time. What's the pros with being logged in to live?
For example when you're logged in to chrome all the history will be saved to your google account. Is it similar in any way in Windows 8? Are things saved to my account? I don't know what that would be but...
What's the difference between a local account and logged in to live? Is it just that when you're logged in you can acces the store and recieve e-mails etc?

What happens if I have a local account and I have things saved in Username/pictures for example, and the log in to live. Will there now be two different user folders? One for the local account and one for live. Will all the settings change as well? Will the desktop change? Will metro go back to default?

Thank you in advance.

Personally, I prefer to go with a local account. I'm not certain of all the quirks associated with using the Live account as the admin on your local machine but I'd rather just sign into any applications requiring online hooks manually. If for some reason I can't go online I'd rather not have the machine dependent on the Live Account for anything important. Call me paranoid but I don't want to totally turn over my system to the "cloud".

-Max

In order to access the MS store app and download apps you have to sign in with MS account. Plus it allows you to sync up some of your apps for social stuff, like FB, skype and messenger which is on it's way out.

Even if you use a local account for your Windows 8 login, you can still access the app store, etc. It will just prompt you for your MS online account to get into the store. No biggy.

I believe you can have a mixture of Local and Microsoft accounts on one computer.

So my plan was to stick with a Local account as my main Admin-level account. If I wanted to, I could then create a Microsoft account (with only "Standard"-level privileges on my computer) to use day-to-day. That way I could have all the features of a Microsoft account but the added level of security that my Admin account was Local.

However as others have mentioned, you seem to get access to most things with a Local account and signing in from individual applications when they ask you to.

homtr said:

Hello!

I can't decide whether to use a local account or sign in to my Live account.

Thank you in advance.

Click to expand...

You can have both types of accounts/logins. Signing in with an MS account is not overly risky. Your choice of login probably ought to depend on what you want to do at the time or perhaps most of the time. Personally, I only occasionally am interested in the things MS makes available (and pushes) at me through an MS login. Whatever is available to me there, I get done, IMO, using other better ways.