Setting up a User with Limited Authority

[bpatters69]

Hello All,

My wife and I will have an exchange student who will be living with us starting in early August. We are going to let him use a laptop and he can do what he likes with it as there is no important data on it and if something happens, I can just reset it to factory settings. Its a Dell so it is just a matter of hitting F7 or whatever it is at start up and reinstalling the OS.

Now for the more complicated part. We may give the student access to our desktop computer where we have sensitive information. I know a little bit about how users are set up with various privileges and I will look through the guides on this forum and youtube but I wanted to ask the community about how to set up the exchange student.

Here is a list of things that I want him to be able to do and not to do.

1. I want to restrict his access to several of the folders that my wife and I use. For the most part, these files are in my documents so it would probably be fairly simply to restrict his access to these documents.

2. Installations - I do not want him installing anything on the machine. I think I can restrict his ability to install, right?

3. Printers - I want him to be able to print

4. MS Office\Explorer - I want him to be able to use Internet Explorer and MS Office Apps.

Anything else I should consider?

Thanks, Bill

 

[Megahertz07]

Windows is very weak on security. As a student, he will probably have better computer skills than you do.
For example, if he boots with a Linux USB flash disk, he can access ALL data on the HDD, despite any security you do under Windows, unless you encrypt the data, and I don't recommend doing it.
On Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\User Accounts\Manage Accounts\Create New Account, create a new Account with his name, (Standard User) and log on it. Try to access your or your wife's data. It will be under C:\Users"Name"\Documents.

 

[bpatters69]

Thanks Megahertz. Agree with you on kids these days. All we can do is try to limit our exposure so that is what I am going to do. If he circumvents the security I have put in place that makes it a bit more egregious vs. the information being readily available. I was watching a youtube video about Windows 7 Parental Controls. They controls look easy to set up but to your point they are probably circumventable.

I have to laugh... I am 48 and I am glad I did not have access to the technology today when I was 15 or 16. Who knows what trouble I could have caused. Not to mention the qualify of video games... I use to play Pong if that helps.