PP
Yes, I agree that's a good solution. Also, a school can afford to have a proper corporate-grade firewall which blocks various kinds of traffic, not just crudely blocking port numbers and named URLs as the £100 home routers can do.
The difficulty is with a laptop "owned" by a teenager and used at home. He/she is likely to be using it for all kinds of "personal and private" stuff, which these days is typically MSN chat and email. Unless you have complete authority over the kid, he won't let you have the laptop so you can clean it up. It will just get slower and slower.
Then, if (as is usually the case) you also have a desktop PC at home which you use for your normal work stuff (like say pprune
) he will increasingly demand access to that PC - yet avoidance of fighting (often with their siblings) over a house PC is probably the most common reason why kids are given laptops in the first place. Today, a teenager without MSN chat is like a kid without a bike in our teenage days. Rather sad but short of living on a little island there isn't much that can be done. Having said that, my other one is more than happy drilling holes in bits of metal in the workshop...
There is no easy fix for this. You have to let them trash it, and when it gets completely useless you run the recovery option.