GPO Lockdown - Mute Button

oB1

Hi,

Bit of a strange one - we have labs within our organization that students access, about 300 computers in total, as they are students, we severely locked down the GPO settings, among other things, one of them is the volume controls, within windows seven, as they use headphones, they sometimes like to pretend "Sir my headphones are broke, so i cant do my work" but really, they have just disabled them via the volume controls...

After we disabled this via Group Policy, we found, some how, the students where still doing it.. it was only after some investigation that i found out, it was down to the keyboard, there was a mute button on it that could still control the volume.

As it's a third party control, i can find nothing within GPO rules to disable it..

and we cannot simply replace the keyboards as there are too many.

any ideas appreciated

Antar Bolaeisk

Can you use something like a key re-mapper so that you just disable the ability of the keyboard to mute the computer?

Capt'n Midnight

if they aren't Fn keys then superglue the keys

change the keyboard driver to microsoft generic one
or change sound card driver / remove the sound card app / stop it running

check for bios settings YMMV

Fysh

The Group Policy aspect of this got me interested: there's some nifty stuff in the Win7 Embedded for POS systems, but it doesn't seem to be easily available in the standard release. There is, however, some promising-sounding guidance here on how to check for keyboard scan codes and selectively block them using GPOs. The page talks about blocking the Print Screen key, but if you can get a unique scan code for the mute key on the keyboard the same process should work for you.