Reviewer, 2007-12-25 07:32:00

Access Boss is an easy-to-use security tool that allows you to restrict access to a PC for certain users based on time factor.

Pros: Whenever there are more than one user on a machine there’s always a possibility of things being affected by the actions of other users on your computers. While the administrator and other users categories segregate things somewhat, this application provides means of closer control to other users actions on the machine.

First off you could define the time of the day a particular user can have access to the machine. This can be defined on per day and per hour basis of a day. While this defines the hours at which a specific user could access your machine, one could define a total number of hours usage too. User interaction screens are quite easy to use and are graphical on these two issues. Users get logged off automatically when they exceed the time limits.

Access boss enforces several other restrictions while on use. You could manage a set of security options such as password protected program access, remote computer administration, registry data protection, system time changing limitations and a whole set of shell security options. You could set these restrictions through a simple set of checkboxes and include blocking access to device drivers and disabling task manager, registry editor, display properties, internet options, command line, control panel applets and so on.

Monitoring of actual usage is presented graphically for easy comprehension.

Cons: No obvious problems noted.

Overall: In this day and age when possibly every member of your family has individual machines, this may have limited application. Same is true at workplace, every co-worker typically would have individual machines and will have all kinds of collaboration as well as privacy choices. However, if you do have need for sand boxing individual user on a particular machine, this seems to a good package. Administration is easy to adopt and monitor, a 4 star package.