If my pc goes wrong suddenly and its 'died' whilst Ive been signed in to Hotmail and other password sites --If I go to the library , use Hotmail for instance and then sign out of it, does that mean that whoever subsequently repairs my pc will not be able to just click on my Hotmail desktop icon and get straight in?

Ok on most sites you have a remember me tick box that will automatically place your user name in the respected boxes.
This can be handy if it's your Pc and you only have access.
It could allow someone one to log into that account.But it wouldn't allow them to know your password as it's *** normally.

If your computer does and goes to be fixed, when you were logged into hotmail and such it would have expired by the time they got it working. It's called "session expires"

Sessions are stored on your computer as a cookie, encrypted and unique to your Pc.

Sessions are set by the site you visit, hotmail is about 15mins, it's not a high one.

If your Pc is going for a repair and you have access just delete all cookies.

Hope that helps.

Mark

Sometimes you can, banking sites are very secure and tend not to have a way to remember passwords, Hotmail, MSN etc do.

Logging into a machine isn't that hard, but if the person who's repairing your machine does it for a living, why would they be interested in signing into your Hotmail account ?

Signing out on a different machine wouldn't sign you out on the original one, but if the password isn't held, it wouldn't let that person sign back in, and most sites have a cut-off if you're not logged in for a length of time (the machine dying tends to log you out).

Sometimes people forget passwords, or they get hacked and changed on a different machine. Unless that person knows some very specific data about you getting the password reset from MSN (as obviously the new one isn't on your machine) is going to be very difficult, again, it can be done, but for 99.99999% of people, nobody wants to.

If you're worried, use the one in library to log in, and change your password, then log out. Whatever is stored on your old machine won't matter now, even if you had it set to auto log on, as the password held would be wrong.

Thanks guys, both of you. pc is fine at the mo, but I just wondered for future reference. Very helpful info and much appreciate you taking the time to explain.