Cant figure it out. Have grand kids and want to use my computer. I don't want them using my firefox, office programs because of business and some work related, accessing thunderbird and getting into my email. I only have to tell them but i want it gone and no access to specific programs. How do i go about this. i tried logging into there account with admin rights but i can't and don't know exactly what i should be doing anyway. I don't mind if the use firefox if its there own ver. they use explorer and play games from walt disney etc. girls against girls thing. any help please on house keeping in this area.
thanks for your time.........again.
Hello Tremmor
you are right, all you need to do is set up a different user account for your grand children.
Make sure the user account you set up for them, is NOT a member of the 'Administrators' group. If you give them Admin rights, they can change access rights and even gain access to your entire account (or for that matter, set up a security policy that locks you out of your own account!)
So this is what you do- password protect your own account. make a new user account for them. make this new account a 'limited' account (NOT Administrator), and log off.
When they log on (using this new account), they would still have access to firefox and thunderbird, but they would have a different user profile, they won't be able to get into your emails and files (make sure you save your files in your "Documents" folder, or another folder under your profile. Don't save sensitive information in arbitrary locations on other HDD partitions like D:\MyFiles or something)
Although it would still be technically possible for them to get into your files (by physically opening up your computer case, removing the hard disk drive, plugging it into another computer as a secondary drive and boot up with an Admin account on this computer,
OR,
booting up to a live Linux environment, mounting NTFS drives-a lot of new Linux distros do this automatically- and then access your files) I don't think they would take the trouble to discover workarounds and act them out on your computer just to read your emails (except for if they are computer lovers and want to experiment with security settings - in which case, although not very straightforward, I would still recommend using EFS and encrypting your personal files if data security is really important).
If you want to use EFS, take a look here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypting_File_System
