Account rules.

Need help.
I am grandfather to a wonderful kid 9 years old. Unfortunately he is disabled and he cannot communicate with us via speech. He is learning sign language etc.
He loves using computer and playing games and stuff to learn from via the PC.

I am trying to configure a machine with three accounts.
His dad: Admin
His brother 13 years: Limited
And little Eric: Limited.

Here is my wish. When he logges on I want him to come to his personal desc where he finds his pre-installed stuff. He should not be able to activate Start => Programs etc
I do not want him at this stage to be able to touch anything but his icons on his desc.

If possible I would like him to have one icon to shut down and log off

Is all this possible on a WinXP Home SP2 machine.

Any support in this matter is highly appr.
Michael

 

There so many program out there that will allow a admin to control and allow or not allow on a account. I have one that is very tricky to learn, it work so well, I made a mistake and it would not allow me to boot into desktop any more, so I had to reinstall Win.

Let me look around for that program.

 

You may find Stardock's DesktopX worth investigating which allows you to create a customised desktop. Some example themes can be found at WinCustomize's DesktopX section.

However if hiding the Start Menu is your only concern, you may find WinGuides' Disable Menu Bars and the Start Button article sufficient.

 

Paranoid2000
Thank you for your input.
Question: Will it be possible to tweak only the one users setup and leave the other two users setup normal? How will little Erik be able to logoff from his session if the Start => logoff is disabled ??

Michael

 

I dotn know if this is relevt to your question but in my college on the desktop there is a seperate box that canneot bo closed or anything and it just has to options status which tells you your log in name and how many printed credits etc you have left and a button saying log off that aks do you want to yes or no after. This is a schools network though so it wouldt have been expensive they had somr company called RM do it. I would have though something like this would be availible for home users though somewhere. Do microsoft not do any special software stuff for disabled people or anything, I would have thought they would have.

Hope this is some kind of help

Michael

 

The WinGuides tweak would affect all users (since it involves a change to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT). If you only want to affect one user, then editing that user's Start Menu details (by default, held in \Documents and Settings\username\Start Menu) would be a safer option (you could delete all Programs entries from here) and would retain the Log Off option.

However DesktopX would be a more comprehensive solution (allowing you to create a desktop with icons for all necessary tasks).