What's the Best way to protect a PC from a 7year old? e.g. prevent file deletion

[Deleted User]

I am putting together a free pc as a gift for a 7 year old boy who has very little due to family circumstances.

Many things have gone wrong in this little person's life and I am trying to brighten it a little by providing a pc. :rotfl:

I have been given a pc operating windows 2000 professional. A system I'm not that familiar with, but I did use 98 and now use XP.

I'm intending to create an administrator account, and accounts for family members, but what's the best way of preventing software from being deleted and restricting how much damage a 7 year old can do? :eek:

I've tried restricting file deletion in XP recently (by restricting the user account) on another computer and it only kicked in after it had deleted enough of the file for the programme not to work.

There must be a better way!

I'm not a software expert, nor a computer newbie, having built my own in August 2004 after not being able to find what I wanted (or afford it!), however, Windows 2000 is not my forte, so please go gently with the suggestions and explanations! Thank you

intel

If you click on C:\ in windows explorer you will see al the sub folders appear
on the right preview pane, just click on one then, choose edit select all
then right click and tick hidden and that will hide all those folders.

GreenNotM

Firstly ensure that the hard drive is formatted as NTFS - if not convert it - no need to re-install etc.

Next create the 7 year old's account as only a guest account and not a member of any other groups - such as super users or admins. This will limit the damage that can be done - but the disk must be formatted as NTFS as the various FAT formats do not have security rights and nothing will be transferred if you do the conversion after the account creation.

Put passwords on all the accounts in the admin group. This way the 7 yo account will only be able to damage itself

Ghost

I use XP Professional, but I think Windows 2000 has similar security to XP. As well as setting up a restricted account for the child, as Administrator you will need to get into system 'Policies' and from there you can dictact who or what does what.