Grr.... The attitude of kids....

[AmEv]

Someone keeps on editing the names and icons of several desktop icons on school computers. At first, it was just changing the icons themselves. Then it got changed back to random icons again. Fix again. Come back, several had been changed to "u" "mad" "come" "at" "me" "bro".

I'm pretty sure this is vandalism of school computers. Is there any way to either find out who edited the icons, or just simply lock the icons, prevent them from being edited?

I'm good friends with the admin, so that's not a problem there.


Also, I can't just "hide desktop icons", that's been disabled.

They're XP machines; the imaging software they insist on using doesn't support 7, and they've still got PIIIs in active use.

[xr4man]

i'm pretty sure there is a way to lock the icons, but i don't remember how to do it. of course i got my certs in windows 2000, but xp should be similar enough.

[AmEv]

Read-only does nothing. Just adds a minor step in their inconvenience.

A desktop.ini configuration, perhaps?

[TLHarrell]

Well, some smartass at work (me) keeps setting the display message on the HP Laserjet to show "BBQ SAUCE LOW".

[Aldersan]

LOL TL! +rep for that one

[BuzzKillington]

Kids used to do that in middle school. It was annoying...

The computer teacher made it so changing the name it would automatically change back. A little google might solve the problem though.

[TLHarrell]

Also randomly shown are "OUT OF CHEESE" and "INSERT COIN". We used to have three of the same printer around the office, but have lost a couple due to extreme wear and general crap attitude toward even basic maintenance.

There are software packages set up for places like internet cafes which will lockout such things and/or return the system to a specific image when a user logs out. Same cafe software also logs user logins/logouts, can prevent software installations, manage user time allotments and other really nice features. Might be worth looking into.

[billygoat333]

^ this. We had software on our school's network that would only allow you to do certain things. Everything else was frozen out. I think they called it Deep Freeze.... but that was a loooong time ago.

[Drum Thumper]

Sounds like a User Policy needs to be tweaked.

[OvRiDe]

Microsoft Steady State was designed for that. It's been discontinued, but you can still find it. It still works pretty well.