Limited experience

[johnnywyoming]

I'm working on the computer interactive for my museum's new exhibit and I want to limit access to four or five websites correlated to the exhibit topic. I want to keep visitors from changing the computer and website configurations. I hope to be able to hide the keyboard with only a trackball for visitors to interact with the computer. Using Win 98se and IE5. Suggestions?

[mairving]

I suppose that you could try and use the policy editor in Windows to keep them from getting at any of your settings. You could also disconnect the keyboard once the system has booted up. Make sure that your favorites is cleared and your history also. Any link on these pages you will have to put into IE's blocked site list or even better, go into your Hosts file and add a line for these sites like this:
www.blockedsite.com 10.0.0.0

That way it will try to load the page but won't have the right IP for it. Then you will have to keep an eye on the machine to make sure that no one is spending a lot of time at it.

[Statica]

Thinking out of the box .. here's what you could do:

Create a website that features your own musuem's website, but instead of having it run in a generic IE window, you could have it open up either as a Macromedia Flash presentation or simpler yet, in FULL SCREEN (Kiosk) mode.
Thus you negate the possiblity of ppl checking hotmail from ur musuem

Have your website's links be something of a 2 framed approach. The left frame being the link to say Musuem XYZ and addressed such that when the link is clicked on, you have it openned in frame B on the right.

Now for the final piece.. Use a simple (its pretty basic and ur webdesigner can do it in a jiffy) javascript to come up with an error message / alert if the right mouse button is ever clicked.

Finally, start using USB keyboards instead of PS2 .. here's why, come in every morning, boot up ur comp, remove the keyboard and keep it with your lunch.. if u want to shut down plug it back in, and shut down. If you were to use a PS2 keyboard u run the risk of wrecking it, cos PS2 arent hotswappable.
USB is. Or you could simply, run the cable into a little briefcase with your keyboard and lock it up

What you have is:
the inability to use anything else on the computer except the sites you have set.
the inability to get the addressbar on the IE window, cos its a full screen and u have disabled the address bar.

Of course there are ways to deal with what you have set down, but it takes much more effort and cant be done without taking the time.

HTH