What's the best way to prohibit users from installing software?

I am a Junior technician at a high school in England. Some of our pupils are being loaned laptops for the summer holidays for exam/course work. I would like to prohibit them from installing any additional software on these machines. Can I accomplish this through the registry without having to adjust the individual user accounts and permissions?
There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to use RestrictRun, as detailed here.

You can also deny access to specific programs using NTFS permissions.

To prevent a user or group from running "program.exe":

  • CACLS \program.exe /E /D

You can also create a simple user-level account on each machine that doesn't have permissions for installing software.

This was first published in July 2002

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