I found those links after googling 3 minutes the above sentence because I couldn't' figure out how my teenager kept playing on the computer past his time limit.
The tricks worked and all my computers, even those not used by my kid.
There is even a way to prevent NOF to warn the parent that it was killed. I figured my kid was doing it because I have other ways to track his activity (WiFi connection status). And yet Norton did not make a peep.
We have recent PC's with WIN7 family. His account is a regular user on the computer. The Norton account is well set to block the kid. All the pwd are very well protected.
So how did he manage ? Well, probably with these tricks. I tried them on other computers from user-account (not Admin) and each time I could kill the time-blocker easily : no need to type any admin pwd.
The idea is just to:
- "pop-up" the Time limiter task (Norton Safety minder = "ccSvcHst.exe"). It will popup if time-limit is reached or if you go on the notification icon and ask to disable it.
- When the window is opened, the process becomes very visibl. By doing CTRL+ALT+DEL you will find the running tasks, and especially the Norton one.
- Right click to "go to the process"
- Then, you can kill the whole process tree because you own it.
This is so easy ! Why is this Norton process owned by the kid's account ?
To prevent a message from being sent to the parents, the kid just has to turn down the Internet while doing the operation.
Now, after ~15 minutes the process may be launched again automatically (if you're lucky - one my computer did it). But still. 15 minutes extra time is very long for 5 seconds to kill it.
I am curious to know if Norton has an answer to this "door" because this means the software will not protect any smart kid.