My wife, Michelle, and I have three sons, Connor (4), Cade (2), and Collin (1 month).  While Collin isn’t quite old enough to get into computers, Connor and Cade both love it.  Their favorite educational programs are the Reader Rabbit series, followed closely by several Blue’s Clues games. 

To make life easy on mom and dad, as well as to protect the CDs, we ripped all their games as ISO images using ISO Recorder and keep them stored on my wife’s laptop.  Even using the ISOs, the procedure for playing the games at the kids’ request was still a pain in the neck:

1. Log on to the laptop using either mine or my wife’s account.
2. Navigate to Control Panel and turn down the mouse sensitivity to something more appropriate for a preschooler.
3. Mount the ISO for the game they’ve requested using Virtual Clonedrive.
4. Launch the game.
5. Watch the kids close the laptop lid when they were done, forcing the laptop into standby mode with these full-screen kids’ apps still running and the mouse sensitivity turned way down.  Meaning the first thing we’d have to do when we woke up the laptop was bring up task manager to kill the kids’ app (which would inevitably be pegging the CPU at 100%) and then dig into control panel to readjust the mouse sensitivity.

At some point in there, I realized there had to be a better way.

So the first thing I did was give the kids their own account on that PC.  I created a limited-access account with no password (my wife and I both keep our accounts password protected).  I logged on with that account, set the icon size to large, the mouse pointer scheme to extra large, the folder options to “single-click”,  and set the mouse sensitivity to low.

Then to ensure that the kids didn’t do anything on that system that I didn’t want them to, I ran a tool called Windows SteadyState.  This thing rocks.  It lets you lockdown a PC (and individual accounts on that PC) to a very high degree.  It’s not unlike some of the more draconian GPOs I’ve seen, like in schools and libraries, but it works on a standalone PC. 

It took me some trial and error to get the lockdown to what I thought was an appropriate level.  For example, I left the new-style start menu enabled so that there were no icons placed on the desktop that I didn’t place there myself.  I also re-enabled Fast User Switching, which SteadyState disabled, by setting HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\DisableFastUserSwitching to 0.

So now I had a solution to a lot of my problems, just by hitting Windows-L to drop to the Welcome Screen, and then clicking on the kids’ new profile.  The last step was making it easy for the kids to launch their programs.

Putting big, single click icons on the desktop was a no-brainer, but I obviously couldn’t expect the kids to mount the ISO images before launching their programs.  Luckily, Virtual CloneDrive has a command line mount utility.  Good old-fashioned batch files to the rescue!  Here’s an example of the files I wrote, this one to launch Reader Rabbit Toddler:

@echo off
start /wait "c:\program files\elaborate bytes\virtualclonedrive\vcdmount.exe" "c:\disk images\Reader_Rabbit_Toddler.iso"
timeout 7
cd "\Program Files\The Learning Company\Reader Rabbit Toddler"
rrtw32.exe

The “start /wait” was, I had hoped, so that the CD would be available to the system immediately after that line was done executing.  It wasn’t, so I added the “timeout 7” for 7 more seconds of waiting before trying to launch the program.  The Blue’s Clues games, interestingly, will show a screen asking the user to insert the disk, so the wait isn’t an issue with them.

Finally, I created shortcuts to these batch files on the kids’ desktop, using the icons from the actual executables. 

Now my boys can easily launch the programs they want without any intervention from mom and dad, and mom and dad don’t have to worry about the boys getting into things they shouldn’t.