Win Vista Parental controls and Admin rights

[Spotting Bad Guys]

Morning all,

My son (15) has a Hewlett Packard laptop which I've recently had to enact some pretty strict parental controls. (don't ask why, but he IS 15....).

Anyway, he likes to share data and apps with his friends at boarding school, and as I have now made him a standard user with me holding admin rights, he's now unable to install anything.

I want to retain control, see activity reports and so on, but do want to allow him back some of the rights to install and so on. Is there a way this can be done? Some kind of 'power user' account?

Thanks in advance

SBG

[Saab Dastard]

Interesting question - see MS site here (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709628.aspx), for example.

There used to be a Power Users group in XP.

The Power Users group in Windows XP was designed to enable members of the group to perform system tasks, such as installing applications without granting full administrator permissions.

Power Users also had write access to areas of the file system and registry that normally only allow administrator access. Power Users enabled some level of application compatibility; unfortunately, this did not address a fundamental problem: applications requiring unnecessary privileges and user rights.

UAC in Vista does not leverage the Power Users group, and the permissions granted to the Power Users group on Windows XP have been removed from Windows Vista. UAC enables standard users to perform all common configuration tasks.

The Power Users group, however, is still available for backwards compatibility with other versions of Windows.

To use the Power Users group on Windows Vista, a new security template must be applied to change the default permissions on system folders and the registry to grant Power Users group permissions equivalent to Windows XP.

Unfortunately, MS in their infinite wisdom have not actually said what or where this template might be.

Possibly secpol.msc. I don't have any copies of Vista that I can experiment with - google is probably your only friend.

SD

[green granite]

A link that might be of some use:

Using Windows Installer with UAC (Windows) (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa372468.aspx)