Only allow an application to during certain times?

January 13, 2009 9:55 PM

Anybody know a free, light program for Windows that can lock an application from running at scheduled times each day?

We like to play games here and there at my animation labs but it sometimes gets out of control and we often spend more time playing then we should, especially during high stress projects and I'd love to be able restrict it from being executed during all but designated break times like the lunch break. But it's got to be a really light option and we don't have a budget to put it on so many computers, any suggestions?

posted by chrisWhite to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Is it on NTFS-formatted network storage? One easy way is schedule a batch job which yanks read/execute rights from the folder.

To do so, write a quick batch script using setacl, xcacl, or icacls to revoke read rights for the groups the gamers are in.
posted by benzenedream at 10:38 PM on January 13, 2009

Another easy way is to schedule a batch job that uses the taskkill command to kick running games in the head every minute except during break times. That command can even kill running processes on remote machines, so you could just have the scheduled thing running on your print server or somesuch.

Note: this will fail badly if one of the games has the same executable file name as one of your work-related programs :-)
posted by flabdablet at 10:50 PM on January 13, 2009

Since you've specified windows, you could probably activate a group policy setting to prohibit the specific executable from running on a certain grouping of machines.
posted by PsuDab93 at 8:26 AM on January 14, 2009

Response by poster: Brilliant answers all of you, I'll look into each, Group Policy sounds pretty painless, I hadn't thought of using that!
posted by chrisWhite at 2:29 PM on January 14, 2009