Notes on setting up a gaming account on Windows XP

Saturday 31 July 2004

Notes on setting up a gaming account on Windows XP

I had to set up a gaming account with Administrator privileges for my young cousins on Windows XP because the game wouldn't run on their Limited User Account.

This was my approach:

Create a new account with Administrator privileges and call it "gaming".
Set up a Password for this account.
I don't want them logging on to this account; I want them to access the "gaming" account via "Run As". Therefore, in order to stop anyone gaining access to the desktop, I logon to the "gaming" account and edit the registry:
```
      HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run
      Edit >> New >> String Value >> 
      Value Name: logoff >> Value Date: logoff
      
```
I logon to my young cousins' account (they all share one account), find the short cut icon for their game, right click the icon, select "Properties", click the "Shortcut" tab then the "Advanced" button and select "Run with different credentials".
When the kids wish to play the game, they double click the icon and select the gaming account and password and the game runs flawlessly.
A final step would be to find the game under the "Program Files" folder and limit its permissions only to the gaming account (that is, remove all other permissions). I haven't done this here because the kids aren't aware of what is really going on since all they do is click an icon to run their game under a different privilege; they don't know that this could be extended to other programs and until they become aware, I am leaving the permissions alone.

I could just as easily changed the shortcut target to runas /user:gaming "c:\program files\NameOfGame" but this will open up a cmd box requesting a password and I wish to spare the kids that. (Hint: type runas /? at a cmd prompt to see what options are available).

kayodeok's Weblog

Saturday 31 July 2004

Notes on setting up a gaming account on Windows XP

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