Need to stop people from accessing your control panel? Try this registry tweak for Windows 7. In a business environment, you can push this down via a group policy setting to many computers at once. But let’s say you just want to stop your children from monkeying with settings on your home pc. You can disable the control panel in Windows 7 with these steps, via the registry editor.
- Launch Regedit
- Navigate to this key:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer - Create a new VALUE. Note choose: DWORD (32-Bit) Value. Name this new value: NoControlPanel
- Edit the ‘Value data’. You can edit by double-clicking NoControlPanel, then click in the ‘Value data:’ set to 1. After clicking Ok, the value will display as 0x00000001 (1).
- All done! Test it out by trying to access the control panel.