My son, showing his geekish tendencies early (he’s six), will play with a computer at all hours if given half a chance. I’d like to give him my old computer (Win 98) but want to restrict its usage to daytime hours only.
There’s any number of utilities for shutting down the computer from a command-line. I could put one of these in the task scheduler to shutdown the computer at 7:30 pm so he doesn’t play late.
What I need, though, is a utility (or batch) program to put in the startup folder that will prevent the use of the computer in the night.
If this was unix, at startup I could just check the hour of the current time and if the hour between 8 pm and 10 am, then the shutdown-command would be called again. Anybody know of a utility (or can help me fashion a batch file) that’ll do this?
You’re on the right track. Make a scheduled job with a command line that reads: C:\windows\rundll.exe user.exe,exitwindows
Set the job to run at 7:30 pm daily. On the Schedule tab, click the Advanced button. There you will see an option to Repeat Task. Check it, then more options become available. Set the Every option to 5 minutes. Set the Duration to 14 hours and 30 minutes. Also check the “If the task is still running, stop it at this time” option. For good measure you might also check the option under the Settings tab to “Stop the task if it runs for more than 14 hours and 30 minutes”.
This way the computer will try to shutdown every 5 minutes after 7:30 pm for the next 14.5 hours (until 10:00 am). The 5 minutes will give you time to pause Task Scheduler or Disable the job if you’d like the computer to be on after 7:30 pm.
You’re selling 6-year-olds short. I once grounded my 6-year-old son from his computer and to demonstrate how serious I was I unplugged all the cables and stashed it in a corner. When I got home the next day he had dragged it back to his computer desk, plugged all the cables in correctly (which he must have figured out for himself somehow) and had it powered back on and playing games. A timer would only slow him down by a few minutes in figuring out how to bypass it.
Another tactic I used when he first got the computer at 4 years of age was to set the system BIOS password. There was no getting around that and he had to come ask me to type the password in if he wanted to play. My wife and I tired of typing the password in after about six months as every time he rebooted it (which was often, almost as fun as playing a game) we had to type it again (and again and again). We just told him how to spell the password (he already knew his letters and could hunt and peck). What we found is that he could spell this new word by memory in just a day or so. We started changing the password every week. It’s a good way to get your child in to the habit of spelling out things. We did words like our city and state (handy for address memorizing), phone number, family names, animal names, etc. Of course it doesn’t serve as any deterrent now but we still have the password thing going and learn how to spell a new word every week or so.
I rename mine to WIN.XXX
Then when you shutdown Windows98, you may get a DOS looking message that says you can safely turn off the PC power.
If anyone turns on the PC, it will boot to only DOS and give a message that the WIN.COM file can’t be found. Just type in the DOS command to rename the file back to WIN.COM and the kids can use the PC.
Run NOKIDS.BAT before you shutdown Windows98.
Run OKKIDS.BAT after the PC is booted and halts in DOS because it can’t find WIN.COM. Then reboot and it’s ready for kids again.