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Locking down the desktop...

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by skivtmp

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I assist in the maintenance of several computers that are all used by grammar school students. Constantly they move around icons, change screen savers and colors, etc. Their user accounts are set to the lowest level of authority/access through Microsoft Windows (2000 professional). Is there a way to lock down the desktop or restore the computers on a regular basis to avoid having to manually fix them each time? Is there especially any way to do it without buying lockdown software?

7 replies

by edlockett

If you are on a domain then implement a mandatory user profile. There is plenty of documentation on this on the microsoft web site.

by dviney1

We use DeepFreeze by Faronics. They can make all the changes they want, delete files,icons. We just reboot and it's back like we left it. It works on viruses and adware. We use it in all our labs.

Dwayne

by dclanton

Ill agree about DeepFreeze it is a good tool, if you have the resources to buy it. But he said that he does not want to have to spend any money. In that case if you are running a win2k server simply go to that server into the Active Directory Users and Computers and create a GPO (Group Policy Object) you can configure the settings in that GPO under computer configuration so that they cant do the things they are doing now. After you configure the GPO you can then push it out to your clients via Active Directory. Let me know if you need help.

by skivtmp

As much as I would like everything to be free, that software is much more aggressively priced than ones previously looked in to. I keep hearing people talk about buying software for something Windows should do (via scripts,, policies, etc) so the idea of using a GPO sounds good. Can you eleborate on the procedure? Thanks.

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