Disable and Enable Task Manager in Windows 7

Task Manager is a very useful tool when it comes to monitoring and troubleshooting, and because it’s so powerful, sometimes you as an IT guy may not want your users to be able to open it.

You can control it through group policy if you are in a corporate network managed by Active Directory. But you can also disable/enable it through the registry tweak. Here is how.

To block a particular user from opening task manager

• 1. Log in as this user first.
• 2. Click Start menu and type regedit, and then press Enter to open the registry editor.
• 3. Navigate to the following registry key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

• 4. Double-click DisableTaskMgr key in the right panel, create one if it’s not there.
• 5. Set the value data to 1 to disable the task manager. Set to 0 if you want to re-enable it.

The change takes effect right away. Now you will see the Start Task Manager is grey out.

And you can’t launch it from the command line either, as it will tell you

To block all users from opening task manager

• 1. Login as a user who has local administrator rights.
• 2. Open the registry editor.
• 3. Navigate to the following registry key.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System

And do the same step 4 and 5 as above.

Note: If this tutorial worked for you (and it should work), please leave a comment below. Thanks.