how to restrict certain functions as a administrator

liverp007

New Member
When we were at the internet cafe, we realise that certain functions like, internal tools, running a software, setting and options etc are not permitted. The operator told us that is because they have restricted those functions to prevent surfers mess up their setting. Can we do this at home? we are having XP home and XP pro, how can we set this to prevent our children mess up our setting? thanks in advance.
 
As adminstrator you can assign permissions to a separate account created for others to use. This falls under the Group Policy settings. The help and support section in Windows has a few tutorials there on setting up accounts and assigning permissions to secondary user accounts. One site with guides for both versions of XP is seen at http://www.winxpsolution.com/ApplyingNTFSXPPro.aspx
 
Group Policy does not support setting restrictions to individual accounts; by default, any restrictions you set there will apply to all accounts, including yours.

You'd be better off making your childrens' accounts Limited rather than Administrator. They can still use Control Panel, but they can only change certain settings that apply to them and they can't mess up the system or install programs for all users.
 
On the Start menu you can set program access and defaults. But that would be very limited there. Guest accounts would be more limited then the Users accounts that you might generally use. Applying the pricinple of least priviledge to user accounts in XP is one lengthy article outling how this is done at http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/maintain/luawinxp.mspx

You can also set permissions on files and folders and remove administrative access to them. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/networking/security/permissions.mspx
 
When we were at the internet cafe, we realise that certain functions like, internal tools, running a software, setting and options etc are not permitted. The operator told us that is because they have restricted those functions to prevent surfers mess up their setting. Can we do this at home? we are having XP home and XP pro, how can we set this to prevent our children mess up our setting? thanks in advance.

There are a few retail programs both you can take a look at. The one that would seem to be best fitted is the Access Manager for Windows at the $49- retail price. http://www.softstack.com/accmen.html

A second program for $35- will actually hide a second hard drive or a different partition on the same drive, any of your opticals drives(cd or dvd) as well as password protect them. http://www.softstack.com/hidedrv.html
 
The problem with these paid programs that claim to offer to restrict functions is that if the user is still an Administrator, they can bypass them easily. Admins can terminate processes and stop services, so they could simply turn off any background process or service that tries to restrict them.

Same pretty much goes for Power Users too. The only way to reliably prevent people from messing up your computer is to make them a member of the Users or Guests group, and still then if not done properly, users could potentially elevate themselves and gain a higher level of access.

It's a tricky business, but the software packages that do these so-called restrictions are useless if the user is root; same goes for things like Net nanny or parental control apps.
 
The problem with these paid programs that claim to offer to restrict functions is that if the user is still an Administrator, they can bypass them easily. Admins can terminate processes and stop services, so they could simply turn off any background process or service that tries to restrict them.

Same pretty much goes for Power Users too. The only way to reliably prevent people from messing up your computer is to make them a member of the Users or Guests group, and still then if not done properly, users could potentially elevate themselves and gain a higher level of access.

It's a tricky business, but the software packages that do these so-called restrictions are useless if the user is root; same goes for things like Net nanny or parental control apps.

The cheapest and most effective way to keep people from toying around with a ssytem is to simply "pull the plug"! :P You can also mount a locking power switch to turn on or off with a key only. Or just have a quick disconnect hard drive where you take the OS drive along with you. :D
 
Back
Top