How to share a family PC without going crazy - Part 1: The essential tools

By Ed Tittel

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Everybody knows what happens to the soup when you have too many cooks, but what about the family circle when multiple members must share a PC? That, too, can be a recipe for conflict and confusion, but the soup (or in this case, the PC) need neither be spoiled nor too tasteless when Mom, Dad, and the offspring must share a computer. The secret sauce in this case is a little forethought, some careful organization, and a combination of rules, schedules, and ongoing communication to keep the people happy and the PC working along at its best. Key ingredients to a successful recipe must also include good will and cooperation among those who share the PC, and somebody who's willing to take responsibility to get things going in the first place, and keep them working thereafter.

We present five different articles and also videos to help you with the basic setup and configuration tasks:

• Part 1: The essential tools to start with
• Part 2: Creating accounts for each family member (Watch Video)
• Part 3: Basic security measures (Watch Video)
• Part 4: What do you really want to share?
• Part 5: Regular maintenance of your family PC (Watch Video)

Ultimately, making a shared resource work for all parties involved requires lots of communication, a certain amount of planning, and sufficient flexibility and humor to see the whole gang through occasional hiccups or bumps in the road of computing (and life). You'll want to get together as a group and discuss individual computing needs and schedules (use of computers for homework is a particularly important topic, and needs to take bedtimes and meals into account, as well as competition for sometimes scarce resources). With a wink and a sigh, Mom and Dad will often need to relegate themselves to early morning hours, midday, or late night hours when the younger set is otherwise engaged (or asleep) so that everybody gets a fair crack at the family PC.

Posting and maintaining a shared schedule is a good solution for keeping family members on track, with open avenues for recourse when special school projects or demanding homework calls for extra computing time and access. Gentle enforcement will often be required to get one user out of the hot seat, and another into the same space so that individual time slots can be served up as scheduled. That said, flexible handovers might sometimes be needed when reports must be printed or homework items finished for next-day submission at work or school. 

Getting the family together on a regular basis lets special needs be voiced before too many traffic jams occur (lest Bobby need to work until the wee hours on Tuesday night because Sally had to finish her book report earlier that evening without telling anybody that it was due the next day). Occasional slip-ups are inevitable, so prepare to take evasive action and teach your users to adjust their priorities and activities as will sometimes be necessary. When the rules become too onerous or seem not to be working, don't be afraid to bring the gang together and work out a new set of guidelines to help keep the family PC humming along for the whole user community.

Here are the essential tools to start with

Just as any good soup starts with good raw materials, a good family PC needs good hardware and software that's adequate to meet the family's needs. While a top-of-the-line machine is always nice, it's not necessary to ensure successful sharing. As long as your PC meets the minimum requirements for whichever version of Windows you plan to run (or whatever other operating system your family might prefer, for those who don't mind haunting the fringes of the market in the other ten percent or so where Microsoft doesn't hold sway)—and preferably, exceed them by a comfortable margin (see Table 1 for more details)—you should be able to make things work.

What's really important is that your PC be clear and clean of any viruses, spyware, or other malware, and that you take steps to keep things that way. That means scanning and cleaning up anything you find as part of your initial set-up and launch for a family PC sharing program, and making sure the ingredients are there to keep the computer safe and secure thereafter (with some added protection to help you recover should anything slip past your protective barriers, as we explain later on).

Table 1: Minimum and Recommended Requirements for Windows 2000, XP, and Vista

Notes: Min stands for Minimum Acceptable Configuration, Rec for Recommended/Workable Configuration VGA resolution is 640x480, SVGA is 800x600, SXGA is 1280x1024, UXGA is 1600x1200

Certain ingredients have become key to a safe and successful Internet access experience. Basically, they comprise a number of security software elements that must be considered "must-have" components on any well-appointed family PC. You can find many of these items at low cost or no cost, but have them you must. We cover them here in a bulleted list that includes pointers to low-cost/no-cost examples, but you can also find many Internet security suites that include that functionality for somewhere between $29 and $59 for one year's subscription (and in some cases, covers up to 3 PCs): 

• Anti-virus software: This kind of software deals specifically with infections that seek to reproduce themselves, among other potentially troublesome behaviors. Most reputable anti-virus software does the job nicely, and the big suites (Symantec, F-Secure, Trend Micro, McAfee, CA EZTrust, and so forth) cover anti-virus very well indeed. One good free package is AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition.
• Anti-spyware software: This kind of software deals with unwanted software that installs itself on PCs to ferret out user information and share it with third parties without their knowledge or permission. The big suites do rather less well on spyware than viruses, but their coverage is at least adequate; that said, adding a good free package as a backup is strongly recommended because no single anti-spyware package handles 100% of all known spyware. Good free packages include Microsoft Windows Defender, LavaSoft Ad-Aware SE Personal Edition, and Spybot Search&Destroy.
• Firewall: A firewall sits between a PC and the Internet and keeps unauthorized users from gaining access from the outside, and blocks unauthorized programs from accessing the Internet. The free Windows Firewall included with Windows XP is adequate for this job, but other good free firewalls such as Zone Alarm (which also offers a top-rated commercial version) and Comodo offer more capability and better protection.
• Anti-spam: Now that more than 9 out of every 10 messages on the Internet are unwanted, and e-mail attachments have become the primary vector for malware, spam protection is an absolute must. You can turn on spam filtering in most good e-mail packages nowadays, but free and commercial anti-spam offerings abound, as this Web page from FreeAntiSpam.org illustrates.
• Popup blocker: Most Web browsers and popular toolbars such as Google and Yahoo all include popup blockers nowadays, so you probably already have access to two or more on your machine. You shouldn't see unwanted Web pages popping up while surfing the Web, but if you do, please check out PopupCheck.com. It routinely lists the top 10 popup blockers, and provides detailed comparison testing information and results.
• Anti-phishing tools: Phishing is a technique whereby Web page visitors or e-mail recipients are invited to click links in documents that purport to take them to banks, e-commerce outlets, or other places where financial and identity information is routinely requested and used. Phishing "tricks" these users into disclosing sensitive information to unauthorized third parties and can lead to financial losses or identity theft. Best avoided by careful surfing and use of e-mail, you can also find links to free anti-phishing tools at Anti-Phishing.info.

No family PC should be allowed to access the Internet without covering all of these bases, and also running regular, scheduled scans and checks to make sure what's on the PC is safe and secure.
 
Once you have these tools, we move on to your next task: setting up individual accounts for each family member.