title: Limiting logon hours on Windows XP link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/11/15/limiting-logon-hours-on-windows-xp/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 430 created: 2008/11/15 05:28:06 created_gmt: 2008/11/15 05:28:06 comment_status: open post_name: limiting-logon-hours-on-windows-xp status: publish post_type: post

Limiting logon hours on Windows XP

This is for my fellow parents out there.

Windows Vista has a nice graphical tool for restricting logon hours for individual user accounts on the system. It’s basically a reworking of what’s been available to Windows network admins for years, first on NT and later versions — including Windows XP Professional and Home Edition.

After my youngest was recently found upstairs playing Runescape at 3 AM (he said a bad dream woke him up), I decided it was time to enforce some time limits on computer use on both the Vista and the XP Home boxes. The aforementioned graphical tool made this easy on Vista, for XP a little research up on Technet reminded me of what needed to be done.

To restrict the logon hours of an account, you’d issue the following command:

NET USER [username]/time:[day of week-day of week],[time-time]

So, for example, to limit the logon hours of a user account named fred to from Sunday to Saturday, six o’clock in the morning to ten o’clock at night, you’d enter:

NET USER fred /time:Su-S,6AM-9PM

Blocks of time are set apart by semicolons, thus:

NET USER fred /time:M,06:00-08:00;M,15:00-21:00;T-Su,6AM-8PM

Note that either 24 or 12 hour (AM/PM) time is acceptable.

To verify this restriction is in force for fred, just issue the following:

NET USER fred

and you’ll get a nice dump of all the current setting on the account in question, along with the hours during which logon is allowed.

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