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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    5,065

    Does such a setting exist on computers?

    My mother's employee (who is terrible with computers and barely knows how to use one... I can't believe my mother hired her)... keeps moving and scattering the icons on the desktop all over the place. I've never seen anything like it! She keeps scatterring the icons and moving them into the middle of the screen all over the place. It is so weird and very disorganized. She's been told to leave them alone but does not listen, it is really getting on my nerves.

    The desktop only has 8 icons on it... but they are scatterred all over the middle of the screen in a big mess! She has one icon in the top left corner... and then another way off to the right and another right smack in the middle. It is so bizzarre. She says she's moving them by accident with her mouse. She doesn't know what she's doing! When she deletes soemthing she doesn't even know how to empty the recycling bin.

    I want to LOCK the icons so that nobody can move them. I know that I can select to arrange icons by choosing "auto arrange"... this way she won't be able to scatter them alll over the place. But I don't like that setting because it forces the icons the be arranged in a certain way.

    Isn't there any other setting whereas I can LOCK and tell it to LOCK the icons where I have currently and specifically placed them?

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Posts
    691
    Do you know how to use the registory editor? (regedit)
    You can go to
    HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
    Then create a DWORD value called NoSaveSettings and setting it to 1.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Feb 2003
    Location
    AR
    Posts
    2,382
    Sure is, with a registry edit

    Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
    Create new DWORD value with a name of NoSaveSettings Set the value of that to 1 and they should become locked in place...

    EDIT: Heh, beat me to it...

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Aug 2004
    Location
    South Daytona, FL
    Posts
    2,476
    If you want to really lock it down so that no matter what the user does or tries to install the system returns to "normal" take a look at microsoft's shared computer toolkit. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/s...s/default.mspx
    It may very well be overkill for what you want to achieve, but I've used the toolkit to setup systems for the library and it works great.
    "Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property... Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them." - Thomas Paine

  5. #5
    Just fire her :/ shes not listening.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    5,065
    Thanks for the responses... I don't know if I dare to edit the registry though. I've never done that before and am afraid I'll cause some sort of error. There is a lot of important data on that PC and if I screw something up and have to do a restore it's going to be a pain.

    trau,
    Thanks for the suggesstion. But yes I think that might be a bit of an overkill for what I'm after. She just keeps moving the icons scatterring them everywhere into a disorangized mess! She's doing it by accident... she keeps clicking on a folder and then moving her mouse but forgetting to first lift her finger off the button and ends up dragging the damned icons all over the place. What a moron, scary!

    On a piece of paper I wrote "Do NOT move the icons into the middle of the computer screen. Please leave them organized as is. Please do NOT move them!" and then glued this large note onto the CRT monitor so she'll see it when she arrives in the morning tomorrow. Hopefully that will finally get the point across

    trau, I see you are in Daytona, FL... I'm close by in Palm Beach, FL.

    KyleH112.
    That's what I told my mother... you NEVER hire someone as an office secretary to run your office and handle your computer data who does not know a darned thing about operating a computer... basic simple computer skills are necessary. Just blows my mind. I stay out of it... I don't have the patience to deal with incompetance that bad.
    Last edited by Frosty; 09-12-2006 at 08:37 PM.

  7. #7
    Is your mother sure she is only moving the icons? For all she knows the employee could be moving files and folders around or deleteing them.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jul 2003
    Location
    Goleta, CA
    Posts
    5,566
    I'd say the secretary is the hardest employee for any business to hire. It's so hard to find a good one and they do pretty much everything.

  9. #9
    True but one that messes with the company or the systems may not be the right one. check out webattack.com they have alot of freeware programs might be one your looking for.

  10. #10
    Just take a screenshot of the screen. Set that as your screens backgound image and maybe the employee will get so frustrated trying to move the icons she'll quit.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Aug 2001
    Posts
    5,065
    page-zone,

    LOL... I just might give that one a shot if the gigantic notice I just taped onto the CRT screen does not work!

  12. #12
    Join Date
    Nov 2003
    Posts
    691
    Quote Originally Posted by Frosty
    Thanks for the responses... I don't know if I dare to edit the registry though. I've never done that before and am afraid I'll cause some sort of error. There is a lot of important data on that PC and if I screw something up and have to do a restore it's going to be a pain.
    Save this as a .reg file and run it:
    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

    [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer]
    "NoSaveSettings"=dword:00000001

  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Frosty
    page-zone,

    LOL... I just might give that one a shot if the gigantic notice I just taped onto the CRT screen does not work!
    I did it to someone once. Set the toolbar to auto hide and move the icons they use off the desktop and they though the computer was froze up, clicking "start" did nothing. It took them about a minute to figure it out.

  14. #14
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Posts
    13
    page-zone thats pretty funny. we did stuff like that for school with roaming profiles if someone left their account logged on we created something gay in paint and set it as a desktop icon so when they logged on it would pop up and some people didnt know how to get rid of it.

  15. #15
    We had a problems with people installing software getting viruses etc and I found a vmware image with everything you need on it works wonders . Just load linux on the pc copy over that image and then install vmplayer and bam you will have a nice system that will revert back to what ever you orginally had it at if you make sure to set the image vmplayer is using to non-persistant..

  16. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by midwestkel
    page-zone thats pretty funny. we did stuff like that for school with roaming profiles if someone left their account logged on we created something gay in paint and set it as a desktop icon so when they logged on it would pop up and some people didnt know how to get rid of it.
    I came close to being fired a few times for computer "crimes" back in the Windows 3.0 days. Like the "crime" of playing computer games at work. I'm glad those days are over. A group of us were going to be fired for playing some game called scorch. The IT guy was coming in from another town to figure out who installed it from the time stamps. That's when I went out and leaned a nice windows command to prevent that from happening - format c:

    We blamed it on a big magnet and the IT guy agreed that was possible. We KNEW it wasn't possible because that was the first thing we tried.. So they put out a memo, NO MAGNETS!
    Last edited by page-zone; 09-13-2006 at 04:39 PM.

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