Setting up computer for students – Windows 7
August 4th, 2016
I’m a teacher at an international school. Recently our school got new-ish computers for our lab. We don’t have the IT staff to really look after anything. Our last computer lab the computers all got trashed by students changing languages, backgrounds and downloading programs.
The IT set up an administrator and student account on each computer but it seems the students still have way too much power to change things. I would really like to limit the amount of things students could change. Basically I’m looking for advice on how to do this.
I’ve read about Windows 7 guest mode which sounds pretty close, but the problem is from what I’ve read it deletes any files once you log out and we want students to be able to save pictures or files into a folder on the desktop.
Any advice or anything you think would help me to know would be awesome.
First of all install NetSupport Client and after that install Faronics Deep Freeze
http://www.netsupportschool.com/
http://www.faronics.com/en-uk/products/deep-freeze/
Was going to also say Deep Freeze. When you install it, you set computer the way you want and then it basically takes a snapshot of it and whenever you reboot, it always goes back to how you originally set it up. You can also create what they call a thaw space, where you tell deep freeze to leave it alone when wiping everything else. So it can be installed so that you have a sort of partition available for your students work. But having a setup like that can be dangerous, as viruses can be planted into this thaw space.
My advice:
1. Enable password protection in BIOS, And by that I mean a supervisor password and not a user one.
This will prevent people from changing the settings (They won’t be prompted for it unless they’ll attempt to enter it!)
You should also make sure the HDD is set as the primary boot device to be on the safe side.
2. Create a new, Standard (Limited) user account as explained here:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5261/beginner-geek-add-a-new-user-account-in-windows-7/
3. Enable guest mode:
http://winsupersite.com/windows-7/windows-7-feature-focus-guest-mode
4. If the Ultimate or Enterprise edition of Win7 is being used, You could use applocker to further restrict which apps can be executed:
http://4sysops.com/archives/applocker-tutorial-part-1-planning/
You could adjust it to only allow running certain apps and disallow all others.
Despite the fact that all changes would be reverted upon a reboot/shutdown (Due to guest mode) giving
users the ability to run whatever apps they want is generally not a good idea!
5. To block porn sites, Install K9 web protection:
http://www1.k9webprotection.com/
6. Password protect the admin account (And make sure you use a decent password which is not easy to guess!)
Optionally, You could also hide it from the welcome screen with a simple registry trick:
http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/windows7/windows7_registry_hide_users.htm
The CTRL+ALT+DEL trick however (To display a user/password prompt on the welcome screen) doesn’t work
in Windows 7, So if you’d wanna undo this later on, As a limited user, You’ll have to click on the start menu, Type regedit into the search box, Right click it, And choose “Run as administrator”, The rest is obvious enough. Or you could just get by with the “Run as administrator” part whenever you’ll need to run particular apps with admin rights.
As for personal data – It has no place on a public computer!
If anything, You should advise your students to use flash drives for this purpose (Or a cloud based solution, Like Google Drive/Onedrive/Dropbox) Flash drives are very cheap these days, Not to mention available world-wide in large quantities, So getting em won’t be an issue.