Epic store / gog etc parental control

Good Luck and let us know how you get on

Just don't give him admin rights on his laptop and he won't be able to install anything. Just give him normal user rights and same with any guest accounts so he doesn't try and login that way.

I remember at one parents night when my oldest was at primary, the teacher wanted a quiet word without my son being there.

He managed to crack the school computer / network and download a load of games and took ages for the teachers to suss out what had happened and who it was.

When I asked my son why he did it, he said the games there were boring so he was just trying to see what he could find. Obviously the systems were not secured very well. I couldn't give him in to trouble as he did it with no malicious intent and teacher said the same and just asked me to have a word with him to not do the same.

His brother on the other hand at high school during tech and has absolutely zero interest in the gubbins of computers were stripping and rebuiding a PC and wondered why they still had a jar of screws left, they (him and his friend) literally stripped the PC down when they were not supposed to. They had absolutely no idea what they were doing. Oops. (edited)

No idea what you just said?

My son is getting a laptop for Christmas and I've been out of the child having windows but for years

you can not have a card associated with the account which will prevent buying things but that wouldn't stop the freebies. (edited)

You can always if needbe give him admin permission if he needs to download something but make sure he doesn't see or can guess your password to change his account to admin.

It's amazing just how clever / smart these little bighters can be with technology these days.

Another possibility might be to download onto your account, save onto a flash drive and transfer over to his account or can he access your drives via file sharing ?

Yes same son created a program to run at random times on random computers, call it a mini but not malicious virus if you like. He was just being mischievious and saved it well into the computer network.

Years later it was still there and would still run. Again so much for security, they should have been able to trace it back to him as it was written and saved via his school IT account.

We were shocked when it was still there years later, but did make us giggle.

The irony is he doesn't work in IT, but with Amazon in their distribution warehouse and not finding a job with the degree he did.

If you are a member of moneysavingexpert.com there is a tech part of it and the guru's on there are usually realy good at helping folks so might be worth a posting on there too.

It's amazing just how helpful folks can be to strangers on forms for free and often members of professions / professional bodies including solicitors / pension folks / benefits folks (I'm one of those with Pension Credit as my forte plus a couple of others), plus many great IT boffins. (edited)