I am running Win XP Pro and am currently facing an annoying situation. I am the adminstrator of the computer, and the impatient local users of the PC have been rebooting and shutting down the computer in order to speed up their accounts. I usually leave my account running dvd ripping and converting while i'm not there. Due to the intense memory eating habits of these programs, they tend to slow the computer down when other accounts are opened. I must add that i am a super tweaker and one of those people that can't stand anything extra running in the background. I have a handful very crucial processes running and nothing else. All spyware, adware and trojans are cleaned regularly with utter joy. Now the question for any hardcore windows users out there, how do i prevent these 2 users from shutting down or restarting the computer. I would still like them to be able to log off and switch users but no shutting down. Please help!!!
I believe you can set access to shut down the computer under a group policy. Run gpedit.msc and go to User Config, Administrative Templates, Start Menu and Taskbar. Prevent Access to the Shutdown command is what I was thinking of. On a side note, as long as they have physical access to the machine there is nothing to prevent them from just switching off the power. If they won't listen when you are telling them to not reboot, they probably won't listen to you when you tell them not to power cycle it.
Thanks Xian for reply. I did what u told me, however it restricts Shutdown privileges from all users even the adminstrator. However I found a new solution that allows you to restrict Shutdown privileges to individual user accounts. I will state the process for future's sake. Remember you have to have access to individual user accounts for this to work. 1)Go to StartMenu>Run 2)Type in regedit 3)Expand the tree to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer 4)Right Click on an empty area and select New>DWORD Value. 5)Name the value 'NoClose'(w/o the quotations ofcourse) 6)Right click on the value and select Modify 7)Make the 'Value Data' to '1' Thats it, thats all. Just LogOff and LogOn again and you will see that the Shutdown Button is gone from the StartMenu. Alt+F4 and alt+ctrl+del has also been restricted. The only option available for that user is LogOff or SwitchUser. Hope that helps future inquirers. And I talked to my users about the situation and they seem to be bearing with me. I also put up a notice stating my intents, heheh. However, as Xian said in his post, they can always turn the power off.
