Students Turning Monitors off and preventing full shutdown

[supportman]

How does everyone prevent students shutting down the computer at the end of the lesson? I'd like to always just restart or logoff so its ready for the next person.

 

Also what about screens? I've noticed a lot of our students turn off the screen with the front button, this is annoying for the next user.

 

I'd love to know if either of these are preventable without writing up a lot of advisory labels!!

[Steve21]

We remove shutdown from the start menu via GPO

 

Obviously won’t stop someone pulling a cable etc but most will just hit restart then instead

 

Monitor wise we haven’t ever had that issue more the opposite of people not turning off!

 

Steve

[Jaan]

Yeah, students can only shutdown from the login screen here. Too many clicks for them so they don't bother once logged out........ monitor thing can be an issue for us here also.

[sdc]

We remove shutdown from the start menu via GPO

 

Obviously won’t stop someone pulling a cable etc but most will just hit restart then instead

 

Monitor wise we haven’t ever had that issue more the opposite of people not turning off!

 

Steve

 

Could you please share how you've achieved this? My ideal scenario is as follows, but I accept I may be being too optimistic with this: (1) all student-use PCs can only be logged off or restarted; (2) all staff-use desktops can only be logged off or restarted; (3) staff laptops have ALL options available to staff; (4) administrators can perform any action.

 

So far, my experiments have led to a group policy which has removed staff's abilities to reboot their computers, which is less than ideal. It seems I need to start looking at loopback processing if I want to get more specific, unless there is something I've overlooked...

 

Thanks for any tips!

[Mako]

To lock students down, in GPO:

User > Admin Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar> Change Start Menu power button: Log off

User > Admin Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar> Remove and prevent access to the Shut Down, Restart, Sleep and Hibernate commands: Enable

Computer> Admin Templates> System> Power Management> Button Settings: Select the Power Button action: Take no action (this prevents the PC from doing anything if the little darlings reach over and press the power button on the chassis).

 

You'll need to look at the options in those areas and tailor your GPOs to users/devices as you need. You may also want to review most of the settings in "User > Admin Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar" as it's where you remove most of the gumf around the start menu etc.

 

Also refer to the documentation for your monitors. A lot of monitors can actually have their input buttons locked! Depends entirely on make, model, manufacturer etc but we have suites of PCs where you can press a button combination on the monitor to completely disable the input and lock the power button.

[dapaulio]

+1 removing shutdown from the start menu. Also remove the option from the Cad screen where task manager and change password would be. This is also a group policy

[gaz350b]

In current times you are looking at this wrong. Let them shutdown. Powering on a machine these days shouldn’t take that long.

 

Save your school money and let them.

[lmgtfy]

On Dells monitors you can lock all the buttons including the power button which is great. On most others you can lock the on screen display menu to stop colour changes at least but perhaps not the power.

[jthompson]

A bit surprised that people don't want to allow shutdowns. I quite like that students are shutting computers down as it gets the update compliance numbers up faster! The time taken to cold boot these days doesn't really make it worth the effort to drill the students to not shut down. We've never really gone for enforcing rules around it, so YMMV under a different school culture.

 

Having AIO PCs has simplified things a lot, where we used to have monitors being turned off to save power, with the actual computers behind them being left on.

 

Panel locking monitor OSD controls is a good idea though. If your students are anything like ours, they love to ramp up the brightness level and fiddle with contrast/colours so that the power usage is way higher than it necessarily needs to be. The Dell panel locks have been defeated here, though, so I still find myself restoring factory defaults quite often. Just one of the reasons why I like having AIOs.

[howartp]

Since summer we've shutdown any IT Suite PC not logged on within 10 minutes of the lesson, then WOL them 5 minutes before the next lesson.

 

Best of both worlds - energy savings, updates installed but ready to go for students.

[dapaulio]

In current times you are looking at this wrong. Let them shutdown. Powering on a machine these days shouldn’t take that long.

 

Save your school money and let them.

 

I agree however like in most school scrap that all schools you have senior management with their own agenda.

 

Last school I completely managed the shut down. Student machine were turned off at 3:30, and then staff and students were again shutdown 30 mins typically about 6pm before site team locked the school up. This was communicated as a get off site now before your locked in.

Computers would then be turned on by the user when it is required the next day.

 

However the school I’m currently managing has a fleet of about 200 hp that carry the symptoms of delayed post on cold or warm start by averaging about two minutes. This was down to a bios update that can’t be reversed aparently. (Interested on anyone else’s experience views here). In this circumstance I have opted for sleep after so long inactivity which carries its own issues but best work around until we can replace the hps

Tia

[clareq]

Could you please share how you've achieved this? My ideal scenario is as follows, but I accept I may be being too optimistic with this: (1) all student-use PCs can only be logged off or restarted; (2) all staff-use desktops can only be logged off or restarted; (3) staff laptops have ALL options available to staff; (4) administrators can perform any action.

 

So far, my experiments have led to a group policy which has removed staff's abilities to reboot their computers, which is less than ideal. It seems I need to start looking at loopback processing if I want to get more specific, unless there is something I've overlooked...

 

Thanks for any tips!

 

Look at WMI filtering to prevent the GPO applying to laptops. You can search for the presence of a battery:

 

Select * from Win32_Battery WHERE (BatteryStatus <> 0)

 

This will find all laptops.

 

Edit

 

I've just found a better code to find "is not a laptop"

 

Select * from Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE (PCSystemType != 2)

Edited November 15, 2022 by clareq