Password protect my printer?

I got a problem at home with my son who just got into some thing called "mindcraft" and he's been printing off reams of sheets of that garbage, wasting tons of my expensive ink and paper. Then he cuts it up all over the place leaving paper scraps everywhere. We tell him not to print any more out but, every time I turn around, he's got new stacks of the stuff.

I figured it would be a simple matter to password protect my printer but, NOOOoooo, Microsoft Windows 7 doesn't have that option (jerks). I tried making a new user account that doesn't have the printer available for the kids but, my wife always forgets to log out.

I've looked online and found a few options but, they all cost money. You would think somebody would have a free version out there somewhere.

Does anybody know of any free, or at least really cheap software that will allow me to password protect my printer to keep my kids from wasting all of my paper and ink?

My solution would have been simpler. I had five kids and in my house no meant NO!

Originally posted by bourbon2nite
My solution would have been simpler. I had five kids and in my house no meant NO!

That works great when the wife is at work. When she's home, "no" means go cry and whine to your mom 'till she says "yes".

reply to post by FortAnthem


Try this:

How to Password-Protect a Printer (pcworld.com)

The article suggests an app called "Printlock". There is a free beta version or the paid version for $12.95.

Good luck.

Im assuming that you and your wife are sharing an account that is the administrators account.

If that the case then only way you could do it for free a separate account for you and your wife that does not have printer rights and use that for your daily use. Then if you want to print something you will choose the printer from the available printers and it will ask you for the administrators account password before it prints. So no one can print without putting in a password first.

If you and your wife are not using the default administrators account then its even easier as you just remove your account from the users allowed to print and each time you want to print you will have to enter the default administrators password or the password of a user that has the rights to print.

Its always best practice to not run the computer as an administrator for daily use. You can still complete all tasks on the computer its just that you will have to put in a password if you want to perform administrative tasks that could potentially harm your computer.

After further testing of this problem i think my first suggestion may not work the way i was expecting it to.

Its not a problem ive come up against before so i was thinking on my feet a bit. Of course you can control who has access to the print by using right linked to user accounts but it seems that if you select the printer from an account that does not have the rights to print the system does not try to elevate permissions by asking for the administrators account password like i was expecting it to.

So after a bit of rethinking i would say the only way to control access to the printer in the manor you want is to create a separate account that is only used for printing.

How to do it..
- Log in with an administrators account
- Create a new account called something like 'For printing'.
- Password protect the new 'For printing' account.
- Add the new user to the manage printer and manger documents on the security tab of the printer.
- In the 'security tab > advanced' of the printer properties make sure the administrator is the 'owner' of the printer as it might be set to 'system'
- Remove all other users from the print permission including Everyone, the administrators group and the administrator.
- Then only log into that account when you want to print something.
- Set the power options to put the computer into standby mode after say 15mins of inactivity and require a password when it comes out of standby.

Change access on the printer so that 'everyone' is denied.
Then create a seperate account like 'dadrulez'.
Create a runas script locally then when you want to print, print as dad rulez.

Everyone seems to have ignored the real problem but me. So if the boy cries to his mom she will give the boy the password or enter it for him. Going by what the op said, The printer is NOT the problem.

You mean... "Minecraft"...?

Oh man, i love that game.

When i was first learning how to play, i had to print out a bunch of stuff to keep handy.
After a while i didn't need to, once i got the hang of things.

I would say, print what you need to play, and no more from now on. From now on, tell them use the F11 key to go out to window and look things up in the web browser, then they can hit the minecraft window, F11 again to go fullscreen.

Hope that helps

reply to post by Agit8dChop


Good thinking but I dont think that would work, it might run the program you want to use printing with as another user but because the printing 'action' does not use a manifest file there is no way to elevate user rights. Also you can only use a runas command on certain programs.