Thread: Locking down my PCs

As a teacher, I'm regularly faced with pupils tampering with my computers. How can I block pupil access to my desktop settings? All my computers are standalone and I've set up individual user accounts plus a guest account on each one.

If Your guest accounts are set up correctly, you should be ab e to enforce controls on each computer. This applies to both Windows XP and Vista. On any earlier home version of Windows, access control and users weren't set up well, and it's relatively easy to get around them. On XP and Vista, though, make sure your guest account can be accessed (you don't need a password), but ensure all the other accounts on the computer have passwords that are difficult to guess; use non-alphabetic characters (numbers and punctuation) and a mix of upper-and lower-case letters. That way, pupils won't be able to log in to your administration or personal accounts, but they will be able to use the guest account.

Guest users can't install or uninstall software, nor can they access files of other users or the control panel. If your pupils find that they can't log in to the guest account, make sure it's enabled: in XP, click the Start button, then Control Panel, then click User Accounts, and under 'Pick an account to change' click Guest. Under 'Do you want to turn on the guest account?', click Turn On. In Vista, it's under the Control Panel, then User Accounts. Click Manage Another Account, then click the Guest Account icon. Click Turn On on the next page that appears. Repeat the steps for each PC.