personal account security

[B Smart]

I have recently purchased a dell computer with windows XP.
We have 5 children and they each have set up their own
user accounts. 2 of the kids have some how managed to set
theirs up so that it cannot be accessed by the
administrator.
I am not real computer savy but can get around on it. It
was my understanding that as the admin I could view all
files and not be blocked out.
Am I missing something? If some one can explain in plain
english that would be great.
Thanks

 

[Roger Abell]

In many ways Administrators are no different from other
accounts. One of these way is the NTFS filesystem.
If a folder does not grant some admin account, or the group
named Administrators any permissions, they that account
will have no access to that folder.
Account have a Make Private option on their profile's
storage. Apparently a couple of your kids have used this.

Why not allow them to have a private storage area ?

I am not trying to open a parenting discussion, but a
technical one. If you remove this, and as an admin you
can, they will just discover or obtain a method to have
some other location that is private, one you would have
to discover. If you reverse what you have done it will
be apparent to them, and you will need to discuss with
them why they should not do it again. If you make it so
that they cannot do it again, which is also possible, but
that will be obvious to them when they try to again make
it private so be prepared to explain your action.

If you really want to look at their private storage you
can use the backup utility as a Backup Operator and
then choose to restore to an alternate location without
permissions so that you can look over the copy, and
your having done this will not be apparent to them.