password protecting / locking down Win98 system

[housepig]

greetings all -

I just did an install of Win98 on a friend's old computer.

he wants to be able to lock it down when he's not around, so his roommate can't get in and screw with his files. In doing some reading on Win98, I find it's not geared for security, and the minimal password protections in the OS aren't worth much.

to make matters worse, it's an old Acer, so it has one of those "let's hide the BIOS" splash screens, and I can't find the right key to get into the BIOS and set a boot password there.

is there any freeware password utility someone can recommend? preferebly something that will totally prevent access to the machine as soon as Windows boots?

any info appreciated.

[stiltman]

ACER BIOS, try F1, F2, or ctrl+alt+esc

As for trying to lock down win98, about your only choice is to use Poledit If your friend is computer literate, then they'll probably be able to find the work around. I used poledit to lock down all the machines if they tried to bypass the password screen and go to the default user account. I set the only usable program to lockout.exe, which was the renamed poledit.exe file. I only had one 'user to figure it out in a year, but most of the people didn't know anything about computers anyway


:edit: There are many other ways to lock down win98 but they all use a combination of hardware and software. I just mentioned the only built in way of doing it and what I've done in the past YMMV

[housepig]

stilt -

thanks for the info. I did some more checking and found the CTRL+ALT+ESC trick, I'm going to try that next.

the roommate is computer literate, but not super literate, so I think if we make it difficult for him to get in, he'll get the hint.

I'll check the policy edit info out if we can't get it locked at the BIOS level...