How to hide of dissable device manager?

[miko29]

Hi All,

Does anyone know how to disable device manager page in Windows XP Pro?

Thank you in advance.

[IcemanND]

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\SystemChange

Value of: NoDevMgrPage (0 = disabled, 1 = enabled)

[miko29]

I tried that and it wouldn't work. Any other suggestions?

Thank you

[Dr.difreNT]

try, gpedit.msc..... somewhere there

[IcemanND]

Sorry, that was for 9x/ME systems. It appears Microsoft in their infinite wisdom did not include this for XP, at least not n an easy way.

You can rename/delete/change the permissions on windows\system32\devmgmt.msc so that users can't launch it. But that only half solves the problem. Because you can still get the device manager when you launch the computer management console. To remove it from here do the following:

1. open windows\system32 and find devmgmt.msc

2. right click on devmgmt.msc and select Author

3. Now select File

4. Add/Remove Snap-in

5. Select the Extensions Tab

6. Uncheck Add all extensions

7. In available extensions list box uncheck Device manager extension

8. Click OK

9. Verify the Device Manager no long appears under System Tools.

10. Close Computer Management and Save changes on exit.

A user with admin rights could reverse this process though.

[TheFlash428]

What exactly are you trying to accomplish?

Users who are not administrators cannot make changes in device mananger, and most settings you could use to disable it could be reversed by a user with administrator privileges.

I would suggest that the easiest way to deny access to device manager would be to not put users in the "administrators" group--unless there's something I'm missing here.

[miko29]

Thank you very much for all the responses!

What I'm trying to do is hide all the device ID's from end customers/users and disable and access to device manager.

It's very easy to do in XPe and looks a little bit harder in XP.

I hope that make sense.