restrict apps for a user in win xp home

Question

I have a acer netbook with win xp home edition. I want to restrict one user from accessing all the installed apps, I want to give access to notepad only. Please could anyone help me in doing this.

Thanks, Karthik

Answer 1

You could try this program "XP Home Permissions Manager".

You can download at http://www.xphometools.com/download.aspx?p=1

Answer 2

Try out 1st Security Agent.

Answer 3

Well, this is the sort of thing that GPO is meant to take care of, but its not really available on home edition -

you can add the GPO addon for a home system

• Copy the files gpedit.dll and fde.dll from \WINDOWS\System32 on the XP Pro machine to \WINDOWS\System32 on the XP Home machine.

• From a command prompt issue the following commands on the XP Home machine: regsvr32 C:\WINDOWS\System32\gpedit.dll

• regsvr32 C:\WINDOWS\System32\fde.dll Open the Microsoft Management Console (mmc.exe) and select File->Add/Remove Snap-in... Then click Add. Select the Group Policy snap-in from the list of installed snap ins.

instructions via metafilter

or edit the registry manually to do this

Once this is done you can restrict what applications can be run

start up gpedit.msc

User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ System. Then under Setting scroll down and double click on Run only specified Windows applications set it to Enabled, then under the Options section click on the Show button next to List of allowed applications.A Show Contents dialog comes up where you can type in the apps you want to allow users to run. When finished with the list, click OK then close out of Local Group Policy Editor.

via howtogeek

its a little tricky, but apparently MS felt this wasn't a feature that needed to be in home edition. The metafilter thread suggests registry editing as an alternate, but I'm personally not a fan of messing with the registry