Permanently Disable Wireless Card 4

[taterease]

Windows XP Pro, IBM T22 laptops

Default user on each laptop is in local admin group (for reasons I won't go into here).

What we may need to do is prevent users from installing wireless network cards into the card slots (preferably w/o having to snip wires in the hardware <g>).

Is there a way to do this in XP? I've checked 'the usual suspects' and don't see the answer... none of the users are expert computer users, so I don't need a solution that is impossible to defeat, just to make it difficult.

Any ideas gratefully accepted.

Jim

 

[Ali147gta]

disable the PCMCIA controller either at BIOS or Device manager level ?

 

[aquias]

Nice idea Ali, password to protect the BIOS and there shouldn't be any further issue.

 

[Ali147gta]

aaaah BIOS passwords, all our users in EMEA had a two stage bios policy implemented over the past two weeks.... one power on and one setup

they aint happy :-D

thinking back further I would if possible disable it at BIOS level, quite simply as I cannot see why a user would need access to a PCMCIA slot

 

[bcastner]

Open notepad and copy/paste the below as no_pcmcia.reg

**** start copy/paste below this line
REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Pcmcia]
"Start"=dword:00000004

**** end copy/paste above this line

This can be pushed through the logon script:

regedit /s no_pcmcia.reg

This disables the pcmcia slots.

 

[Ali147gta]

a star for you bcastner.....

nicely done indeed !

 

[taterease]

Thanks, everybody! I was able to make the change in the Registry and it worked like a charm.

Jim