Need to virtualise one user and not the whole pc

hi guys,

I have a pc at home which I share with my family and kids. It has Windows 8 Pro installed and 2 accounts - Admin and Family.

My kids will sometimes accidentally download or mess up some settings. Now I know you can use GPO to stop that, but I really don't have the time to go through all the settings and try to lock their account down.

I want some software (don't mind paying if it gives me better features!) which can:-

1. Bring ONLY the Family account back to it's original state and not touch the Admin account at all.
2. If possible, it resets the account on log-off/log-on, rather than a full reboot.
3. Avoid certain sections of the drive/folder, so that they can still save any work they do in ms office etc.

What can you recommend?

 

You could try icore virtual accounts. Sorry don't have time to link it just Google it. I think development might have stopped on it though.

 

As long as they are on the standard account, I don't think they can mess things too much. If you want to block them from downloading then you can take away the create and write rights of your download folder for standard user via ACL. If you want to quickly recover the PC to its previous state then there are Shadow Defender or Deep Freeze, but both require you to reboot to revert the changes.

 

Drive Vaccine also has a restore on log off solution.
http://www.horizondatasys.com/en/products_and_solutions.aspx?ProductId=2

 

Getting another machine would be the simplest solution.

Otherwise, solutions that have been developed for library, Internet cafe, kiosk etc PCs might work. For example, -http://sysadministrivia.blogspot.com/2012/05/creating-kiosk-machine-with-windows-7.html

You could also create a VM, and lock down a user account so it can't do anything but run that VM.

 

Did you find something suitable to your needs?