Shar­ing your com­puter at home or busi­ness doesn’t mean any­one with access can or should be able to make changes that alter the over­all sta­bil­ity of your sys­tem. Some changes, when done incor­rectly can destroy the whole sys­tem. To play it safe, Microsoft cre­ated a cool tool that allows you to put some restric­tions on com­put­ers that are shared.

Now you can share your home com­put­ers with your lit­tle ones and give them appro­pri­ate access to per­form their tasks with­out wor­ry­ing about them mak­ing some dan­ger­ous changes that may ren­der your com­puter inoperable.

Even if the changes are already made, they will auto­mat­i­cally get reset once the com­puter is restarted. And because it’s non-IT cen­tric, even grandma should be able to work this tool.

To see how this tool works, I’ll going to install and con­fig­ure it in a simple-to-follow tuto­r­ial for you below.

1) Down­load SteadyS­tate for your Win­dows XP or Vista machines here. It is required that your val­i­date your OS before you’re allowed to down­load the program.

2) Install the val­i­da­tion pro­gram from Microsoft. Click the Down­load but­ton after validating.

3) When prompted click Run

4) Accept the license terms and val­i­date your sys­tem again.

5) Click Next then click Fin­ish to com­plete the instal­la­tion.

6) Open SteadyS­tate for the first time. This is the con­trol panel. You set restric­tions, add users and con­fig­ure set­tings from here.

7) Set com­puter Restric­tions by click­ing the option ‘Set Com­puter Restric­tions’. Select the set­tings to enforce and click OK when done. You can pre­vent users from cre­at­ing files and fold­ers, pre­vent access to USB devices and more.

Pro­tect Hard Disk by click­ing the option ‘Pro­tect the Hard Disk’. Select ‘Remove all changes at restart if don’t want changes to stay on the com­puter. Any change to the computer’s set­tings dur­ing oper­a­tion is not saved after restart­ing the computer.

9) To indi­vid­u­ally restrict an account, click on the account name and enter the pass­word. Then begin select restric­tions. Set how long before the ses­sion ends. This option allows you to put time limit on the user.

10 More set­ting to restrict the user from access Pic­tures, Music, Start but­ton, and other fea­tures on the computer.

11) Block pro­grams you don’t want the user access­ing. To block a pro­gram, select the pro­gram from the left then click the Block but­ton. To select more pro­grams, click the Browse button.

After con­fig­ur­ing all set­tings, save and close out. Now you com­puter con­fig­ured, sit back and relax, noth­ing can destroy your com­puter any­more because any changes will get wipe out after your com­puter restarts.