I work at a public library and am trying to set up our public computers to restart when they are left idle for 10-15 minutes. Ostensibly this is straightforward, I can add a task in Task Scheduler which executes shutdown.exe /r after it detects the computer has been idle for 15 minutes, but the issue is that these computers are also set up to autologin to the User standard account, so if the task starts running on login, it will just keep restarting every 15 minutes indefinitely until someone happens to start using it. It's important that the account not have a password.
One idea I had was to try to get the computer to boot to the login screen, where the User account is preselected and they just have to click "login" to finish logging in, which is what happens when I log out of User and it goes back to that screen, but if the User account was the last used, Windows will always automatically finish login on that device when it starts up, regardless of any registry settings I change. I'm actually probably ok with this because there's also an Admin account that I don't want them even seeing is on the device and trying to log into.
I also have tried writing a PowerShell script that detects the last activity of a user using the GetLastInputInfo API, but after that didn't work I looked around online and found that apparently this function does not work at all if auto login is being used, which was irritating, but whatever.
Currently the best solution I have found is requiring Ctrl+Alt+Del on startup, and when that is pressed the User account will finish auto login. I am worried that people (and therefore my superiors at the library) will not like this because it's new and many of our patrons will have a hard time figuring out what to do, even if it says it on the screen. Not trying to judge anyone, just being realistic.
Is there any other obvious solution I'm missing, or are there any other strategies I could use to accomplish this?
