To go along with my “Disabling / switching keys on your keyboard” post, I also was asked how to disable the windows task manager so that potential users could not turn off the computer or close down any running applications. This was a bit tricky, but after some googling, I was able to come across a built in setting for windows that does just this.
By default Windows doesn’t have access to this setting just sitting around for you to turn on and off, but with a little registry modifications, it can easily be done. The key you are looking to modify is inside [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System] and is called [DisableTaskMgr]. If you want your task manager off you simply set the dword Hexadecimal value to to “1″, and to re-enable it, simply clange it back to 0. Note that the first time you do this, you will more than likely have to create both the “System” folder and “DisableTaskMgr” key.
Don’t know how to work with the registry? Don’t worry, no research needed! Below is a zip file containing two different registry (.reg) files that you can download to automatically handle this! All you do is simply run the file and after you confirm you want to execute the file, your task manager will be set to the settings of your choice.
Enable / Disable Windows Task Manager (Alt+Ctrl+Del)
It’s that simple! Again, I hope I was able to save some of you guys the time I spent researching this.
