O.k., now I will answer Richard's.....thanks!
<<<<Use Group Policy and parental controls to lock down access. If you do not have Vista Ultimate/Vista Business Editions, you can use the registry, and I will help you with this. What parental controls are you using, and what version of Vista are you using?>>>>>>
Windows Vista 64 bit. We use their parental controls. See my above post.
Group Policy is slightly different to Parental Controls. It is for businesses to control staff, but we can turn some of its functions to your uses. You do not need to worry about this, I will give you exact, easy to follow instructions.
Could you please press the Windows Key + R top open the Run dialogue. Go past any UAC prompts if necessary. Type
winver and press enter. In the dialogue that pops up, there should be a coloured logo at the top. It will say something like
Windows Vista Home Premium. Can you please tell me exactly what your one says? Thanks!
<<<<In terms of the BIOS password, that is very sensible, your son will ignore this for the moment, but if he suddenly becomes a true hacker overnight, then this will be a crucial line of defence. If you carefully fiddle the BIOS, you can stop bootable USBs and Linux Live CDs from working, without using your BIOS password, so do not worry about osholt's supposed workaround!>>>>
So.....are you saying there's something I can do in BIOS to stop bootable USB's (no idea what that even is) and Linux CD's from working?
Sometimes. I doubt your son will do this if he had to ask a friend about Safe Mode, and I will fiddle about with my BIOS to see what I can do, and come back to you on this.
<<<<In terms of Safe Mode, this is an age old problem. Here is about the only solution:
how to enforce parental controls in safe mode in Platform SDK Security and you will notice that it requires some programming. I will do this for you if you wish>>>>
Wow....I read this link and it sounds scary to me. I appreciate your offer. I will think about it. I hate this stuff.
There would be no need for you to do anything technical. I will do the technical stuff, and all you would have to do is run an .exe file once to install the Service and get it starting up in Safe Mode. I think you should consider it. I am reinstalling today, and will hopefully be ready to go by the end of tomorrow. It is your choice, but I promise that this is not a big project, and it would be fun for me, not a hassle. In fact, I will make it, and make a tutorial of it, and then whether you use it is completely up to you. << You don't even have to tell me whether you do or not!
<<<Else, we could add all required parental control services and dependencies to Safe Boot, though you are now loosing Safe Mode's only crucial services>>>>
What does that mean exactly? What risk am I taking if I do this?
Do not worry, and sorry for any confusion I have caused. If you want something even simpler, you could just tell Safe Mode to initialise Parental Controls. You would then need to initialise RDC (Parental Controls replies on it) The only disadvantage of this is that if either of these break, then Safe Mode will break, but this is a very, very small risk, and the only other risk is if you lose your Parental Controls master password, with this enabled in Safe Mode, it would b harder to circumvent, though I would be able to get you round it if you ever had a problem, and so not really a big problem.
Richard
