Home > Security

WindowSecurity.com - The Shared Computer Toolkit helps to keep information on shared computers secure so that one user can't access the files or make changes to the configurations of other users. With the toolkit, you get the following tools:

• Windows Restrictions Tool
• Windows Disk Protection Tool
• Windows Accessibility Tool

Installing the toolkit
At the time of this writing, the toolkit is in public beta. If you want to try it out, you can download version 1.0. Remember that this is beta software and shouldn't be installed on production machines. It installs on Windows XP Home, Pro or Tablet PC and SP2 is required.
Note: The Toolkit does not run on XP Media Center Edition or XP Pro 64x Edition. It does run on Tablet PC Edition.
The download is relatively small (2237 KB) and takes about one minute with a 1.5Mbps broadband connection or about six minutes with a 56Kbps dial-up connection.
Note: To download the Shared Computer Toolkit, you will need to allow verification that your operating system copy is legal by allowing the Windows Genuine Advantage scan.
The downloaded file is a Windows Installer package named Shared_Computer_Toolkit_ENU.msi. Double click the saved file to start the Setup wizard.
You need about 5MB of free space to install the Toolkit, but the Windows Disk Protection tool requires another 1GB or more (depending on the size of the disk).
You'll be asked to accept the EULA and to register your copy of the toolkit. You cannot continue the beta installation without registering. When you click the Register Now button, you'll be taken to a Web site where you must sign in with a Microsoft Passport account. Then you'll be asked to fill out an online form with information where Microsoft can contact you for a survey. When you submit the form, you'll be given a registration number. Fortunately, you don't have to go through this process every time you install the toolkit on a computer in your organization; you can use the same registration code for all of them.
Once you have the code, enter it in the Customer Information page of the Toolkit's Setup wizard (and save it to a file or write it down if you intend to use it for subsequent installations). The next page of the wizard informs you that it will be installed to c:\program files\Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit\. You cannot change the installation directory. It takes less than a minute to install on a typical new computer. The Getting Started screen will display by default when you finish the installation. It will continue to display each time you start the tool unless you uncheck the box labeled "Show Getting Started at Startup" at the top of the screen, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: The Getting Started screen
Note: If the shared computer is a member of a domain, you'll receive a warning and instructions to read Chapter 10 of the Handbook, "The Shared Computer Toolkit in the Enterprise Environment" before proceeding.
The Getting Started screen provides quick access to a row of icons that represent the following:

• Disk Management
• User Accounts
• User Profiles
• Windows Restrictions
• Windows Disk Protection
• Accessibility
• The Handbook
• The Help file
• Command line
• Log Off Now

Setting up the Toolkit
The Getting Started screen walks you through the following steps:

1. Preparing the disk for Windows Disk Protection: you can use Norton PartitionMagic 8.0 or another disk partitioning utility to create unallocated disk equivalent to at least 10% of the disk space (or 1024 MB, whichever, is larger) after the Windows partition. This space will be used by Windows Disk Protection.
2. Select computer security settings that will be applied to all users of the computer. These include: prevent account names from being saved in the CTRL+ALT+DEL logon dialog; prevent Windows from caching Passport or domain credentials within user profiles; prevent logon to locked or roaming user profiles that cannot be found to improve security; remove cached copies of locked or roaming user profiles to improve privacy and save disk space; remove the shut down and turn off computer logon options; use the Welcome screen; remove Administrator from the Welcome screen.
   1

   2

   Next page