Wow, help files are wonderful & thanks all the suggestions

Still having a problem though, after going to Start>Settings>Control Panel>System I find a tab that allows me to manage User profiles. Selecting Administrator and using the copy to button I can make a copy of the admin profile. A complete copy of the admin. profile! This is the only way I've found to create a new profile and really ia not what I'm after as I can't see how to limit permissions to the admin copy. uuuggghhh.

 

There should be a setup for guest user accounts. I would create her profile and then grant her the guest user rights. And from there just start restricting her rights. Again, I am doing this by memory.

 

Thanks, I'll try that.

 

Try right clicking on My Computer and selecting Manage from the list that comes up. Then, a console comes up with a bunch of different management options for your system. One of them should say something about Local Users and Groups. I forget the exact wording, because I'm on an XP Pro workstation right now. Anyway, you want to create a new user under there that is not an Administrative user. This by itself will not stop the new user from looking into all your personal files (porn, Quicken accounts, bookmarks, etc), but it is one of the correct ways of creating a new user (you do not want to copy profiles from the My Computer properties window like you were trying to do). The other way is to go to the Control Panel and do it that way.

Now, if you originally installed Windows 2000 onto an NTFS partition, then the default file permissions will keep a normal user from looking at other user's profiles (your My Documents folder as well as Favorites folder and many settings folders for other programs like Outlook fall under your profile directory). But if you haven't been saving all of your sensitive files underneath your profile directory (default location is Cocuments and Settings%username%), then you need to take that into account as well and either move those sensitive files under your profile directory or add a specific deny permission for that new user account you just created.

However, if you are using FAT or FAT32 as your file system, you will not be able to set file level permissions. Also, keep in mind that if you originally installed to FAT/FAT32 and later converted to NTFS, the default permissions for many things would not have been set automatically. In that case, you would need to set them automatically. This can be difficult to do and it's possible you could screw some things up here, so be careful and ask for help if you need it once you get to that point.

Your best bet is to create the new account, log in with it, and see if you can get to your files while logged in as this new user. If you can, log back out, go in as yourself and see what adjustments you can make. Then, test it out again.

 

Thank You for showing me the error of my ways! Why am I not surprised that Help files didn't tell cover the entire subject (Profile>copy to). I did install the OS as NTFS and should be able to sort out the profiles.

Thanks again for your help - Cheers

 

Cool, since you went with NTFS at the beginning, you'll have a much easier time. The babysitter should be kept out of most things just by virtue of him/her having a separate account.

Keep in mind that some things in Windows 2000 Pro don't work as expected unless the user has admin. privileges. In this case, I assume there will be no worries about that. If some video game doesn't work right for this new user, it probably isn't a concern. But for others reading this thread and sharing a computer with roommates perhaps, it can be difficult getting everything to work right for all of your users without just making everyone an admin user in which case you could access each other's files if you really wanted to.

Anyway, good luck and let us know if you have any other questions.