How to turn a Windows 7 PC into a Kiosk

Posted on:

January 12th, 2010

Requirements

Windows 7 Professional or higher. You can not do this with the home versions.

Steps to lock down the Kiosk Computer

How to lock down the computer basically leverages local Group Policy (although there is no reason you can’t do this in global group policy on your Windows Small Business Server 2008 machine) to allow users to only run certain applications.  Thus preventing users from getting into trouble and lowering your total cost of ownership on that client PC (or your whole network).

If you have a shared or public computer you might want to allow users to use only specified programs. Today we take a look at a setting in Local Group Policy that allows you to set only specified programs to run.

First click on Start and enter gpedit.msc into the search box and hit Enter.

Navigate to User Configuration \ Administrative Templates \ System. Then under Setting scroll down and double click on Run only specified Windows applications.

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Set it to Enabled, then under the Options section click on the Show button next to List of allowed applications.

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A Show Contents dialog comes up where you can type in the apps you want to allow users to run. When finished with the list, click OK then close out of Local Group Policy Editor.

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If a user tries to access an application that is not on the specified list they will receive the following error message.

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This is a nice feature for limiting what programs users can or cannot access on the computer.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 10:37 pm and is filed under Windows 7. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “How to turn a Windows 7 PC into a Kiosk”

  1. Thomas says:
    February 18, 2010 at 6:07 am

    But afterwards you can’t get back into the Group Policy Editor?

  2. Jared Heinrichs says:
    February 18, 2010 at 9:38 pm

    No. You should be able to get back into the group policy editor as long as you are an administrator of the computer.

  3. Chris Eytcheson says:
    April 9, 2010 at 3:05 pm

    I just tried to get back into the editor and it won’t let me.
    I am a Domain admin

  4. Jared Heinrichs says:
    April 13, 2010 at 5:31 am

    Have you tried logging on as a local admin? Sounds like you made the Group Policy settings too restrictive. If you still can’t get back on unplug the computer from the network. Go into safemode. There are tools you can download that will remove Group Policy restrictions (I like the “Geek Squad” CD for that) and then apply the settings you wish to have. Sorry for the late response. Just had a baby and we’re in the process of moving.

  5. Timo Waltari says:
    June 2, 2010 at 12:23 am

    Same thing happenned to me too. I was in local administrators group but nevertheless I was restricted from running anything else but word in my case.

    It was easily fixed by launching mmc from remote computer in same network. Then I added snap-in “Group Policy Object Editor” which asked if I would like to edit local or remote computer. I specified restricted remote computers name and then I was able to modify restrictions.

    Both computers were Windows 7 but I would believe that it goes same way with previous Windows releases.

    Hope that this helps somebody :)

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