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If you share your computer with other users, be it at work with colleagues or at home with family, there are some steps you can take to safeguard any accidental damage done to the system registry by disabling access. Follow closely as we show you how step by step.
How to Create Automatic Windows Restore Points Each Time You Start Your Computer.
The Windows system registry is a very powerful tool and if used incorrectly can cause serious problems on your system. If you are sharing your computer with others, you can safeguard your registry by disabling access to it from those users who might not know exactly what they are doing.
Before we get any further into this process, you need to make sure you are only blocking access to the registry for specific users, if you happen to block access to the only administrator account on your computer, you will be unable to undo the changes and a complete reinstall of Windows will be required.
Disabling Access to the Windows Registry.
This may seem like a strange thing to start with but in order to disable access to the Windows Registry, we are going to have to edit the registry. This process is going to be the same if you are using Windows 7, 8 or 10.
Note: One last warning before we begin to edit the registry, make sure to backup your registry and important information on your computer in case anything goes wrong, there is nothing worse than losing important data.
The two pre-start steps to undertake are as follows:
Number One: You will need to make sure that the user account that you wish to block access to the registry on is not a standard account and is instead an administrator. If the account is not an administrator account, you can change this by going to: Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage another account. Now just pick the account you want and select Change Account type from the options.
Number two: You will be required to sign in under the user you want to make changes for, as editing the registry is done from within their account.
Note: If you wish to change more than one account, you will have to make sure to repeat the above 2 steps for each account you are changing.
Once you have the above two steps completed, open the registry editor by searching Run from the start menu and typing: regedit into the run box. Upon pressing Enter, you will be asked to give permission to the registry editor so it can make changes to your PC, confirm this with Yes.
With the registry editor now open, navigate to the following key (folder) on the left-hand side.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System
When you have the System key (folder) selected, you will need to create a New Value inside. Do this by right-clicking the System key (folder) and selecting New > DWORD (32-bit) value. Now name this new value: DisableRegistryTools. Next, double-click the DisableRegistryTools value you just created, this will open the properties window. In the Value Data box, change the value from 0 to 1 then click Ok.
The registry will now be blocked on this user account. To test if it all works, try to open the registry editor again using the same method we used above. If you receive an error message like below, everything is working as planned. With this done, you can now change the user account from Admin back to a Standard user, your work here is done.
At some stage if you want to reverse the changes and allow access again to the registry, you will first need to make the count an admin account once more, then open cmd with admin privileges and enter the following command:
reg add "HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System" /t Reg_dword /v DisableRegistryTools /f /d 0
This will change the value we entered into the DisableRegistryTools back to 0
