Xp: Set computer volume and not allow user's to modify it

[deshende]

I figured you folks may help me brainstorm on the issue.

At work we have software that needs to be able to get people's attention by beeping until someone acknowledges the alert. I want to be able to turn up the volume to an acceptable level and then take some measure to make it hard for all user's on the machine to mess with it.


I tried messing with just making the speaker icon not show up on the taskbar but I couldn't figure out how to do this for all user's.

I tried deleting the sndvol32.exe but windows recreated the file each time someone would click on the speaker icon.

I only have to do this on a hand full of computers so I'd rather not have to mess with AD group policy and such.

Any suggestions?

[xopher]

Group policy is going to be the only way.

[bungiefan]

Try with TweakUI. Tell the sound control panel not to display the volume icon in the task bar, then use TweakUI to disable the sound control panel from showing in the control panel items.

[Yabby]

1. Click Start, click Run, type mmc, and then click OK.
2. Click File, and then click Add/Remove Snap-ins.
3. Click Add, click Group Policy, click Add, and then click Finish.
4. Click Close, and then click OK.
5. Expand User Configuration, and then expand Administrative Template.
6. Click Control Panel.
7. On the right pane of the Policy menu, double-click Hide specified control panel applets policy.
8. Click Enable, click Show, click Add, type Sound And Audio Devices to deny access, click OK, and then click OK.
9. Click Apply, and then click OK.

With this in place the only way to mess with the volume is to go to C:\WINDOWS\system32 for the main target.

[deshende]

I'm ashamed to admit that I don't know a lot about group policies. If there's already one in place for all general workstations is setting the above up going to mess with anything or can you have multiple policies active without them over writing each other?

Thanks for the replies. I'll play around with the suggestions and see what works in the environment.

[Yabby]

If you want them to be for only certain computers you have to group them properly before hand.

IE
Room 100
Room 101

Baseline GP security populate both room 100,101
Volume lockout populate room 101

In most cases if there is overlapping GPO's for mult groups the most restrictive will take president. If you don't want to group certain rooms together, but still want certain computers to have volume control you will have to do it manually in local policies.

Edit: That is of course if your using the polices per computers rather than per users.

[Norellicus]

Overlapping GPOs don't work the same way as NTFS permissions; GPOs perform global overwrites of each setting defined inside them, which means the last GPO to apply is the one you want to make sure has the proper settings. It's also why 'not defined' is so useful, as it can be left so the GPO above it takes precedent.

i.e., if your global GPO sets one thing to disabled, and the the one below it has the same setting as enabled, then you will find the setting enabled on any systems assigned to the lower GPO. If you instead leave the lower GPO as not defined, then the disabled rule should still apply.

[deshende]

I've messed with this some and it's proved to be quite a challenge. I tried Yabby's suggestion above and it did remove it from being modified via the Control Panel but did not get rid of the little speaker icon in the system tray. I tried a few other group policy tweaks but that little speaker is quite the vexing thing. (I know you can easily make that speaker go away for yourself when logged in but I couldn't figure out how to make that the default for all users).

The two solutions I've found so far are:

A volume locking program. I does what I want it to do but costs like $15 a pop and no one ever wants to spend money for stuff.

The other option I found was a registry modification to not load anything into the system tray besides the clock. This works across all users so it may be what I decide to do, but the downfall on this is if the users have to use any other programs that require interacting with icons in the system tray.