Trying to lockout students

[Guest]

The question is simple, I am volunteering at a school in the Arctic and the
they have new systems. The problem is that the students download everything
and install junk programs. I was wondering if anyone could direct me to docs
(or explain to me) how to set up the security on these systems, so that
students (user) can not install programs, or download certain file types (or
if they do they are automatically deleted) Even if you can tell me if this is
possible I will get back to the MMC help file. It is just that there is so
much to know and without knowing where to look it is very hard.

If you need anymore info just let me know and I will help you help me

Thank you all,
Craig

 

[MartinHTN]

Craig:

Usually if a user is only a member of the Users group, that person cannot
install programs. If the program is simple and only installs an EXE file,
then that's different, but most big programs will need to add system
registry entries and regular users do not have access to do that. Now, if
you want to lock down the computers and they are in a Windows 2000/2003
domain, then the best thing to do is use Group Policies. GPs can only be
used in a Windows 2000/2003 domain, so you'll need to have that set up first
and add all your computers as members. There are tons of settings in the
GPOs (Group Policy Objects) that allow you to limit particular settings on
each PC. There is even a setting to restrict which files they can run (like
limit it to only allow notepad.exe to run, for a simple example).

There are also third party tools that let you take an image of a PC when
it's first installed (and clean) and then allow you to use that image to
write over the existing hard drive. You can run that every night, for
example, so that every morning the PCs are back in their original state.
Many schools have something like that set up, so talk to your contacts at
others schools about that.

Regards,
Martin

 

[Jerry]

You might want to get a copy of "Microsoft WindowsXP Inside Out" ISBN
0-7356-1382-6 to help you.