Change User Privileges, programs, hard drive access

[etherealgrifter]

set up a new Windows XP user account, would like to allow the account to access some programs, and not access others, but it seems to have chosen and ignored arbitrarily. How do I change that? Thanks. Also, is it possible to tie an account to another hard drive, or do I have to go into the BIOS everytime I want to boot from the other hard drive? Thanks.

 

[statik213]

Limiting access to program to cerain users isn't going to be easy and I don't think there's any builtin support for that in winxp. One way you may be able to do that is to make your crippled user a non-admin i.e. user or power user and track down the exe for every program you want to ban him from and change it's permissions so that it excludes him (i.e. change the allowed users to Administrators from `everyone`)... I'm not sure if you have winxp pro or home and I'm not sure how much you can do in home but in pro you can get into the advanced properties of a file and specfically dissallow certain users/groups from having access to a file (i.e. program exe).

Now, your second question, I'm not sure that you are understanding the concept behind user accounts. User accounts are tied down to a particular installation of windows or to a Active Directory/Domain in a networked environment. So if you have 2 or 3 installations of windows each one would have it's own user base and it won't be common across the system and making an account called johndoe on the first installation and in the second instalttion on the same machine does not make the accounts the same.

What you *can* do is to have a second copy of windows installed on another partition/hard drive and windows will automatically insert a boot menu when it detects that it is a second installation on a computer allowing you to choose which installation you want to boot from. So, you could have another installtion of windows without the programs you want to limit access to and allow your second user acces to that installation of windows.