Locking down your point of sale computer with Windows Steady State.

Windows Steady State is a nice piece of free software to lock down any basic windows account. You can limit access to drives, programs and features and even websites so your employees spend their time focused on work and less time on Facebook. Another benefit to locking down your workstations is troubleshooting. When something goes wrong with the computer it’s easier to narrow down the source of the problem when you have control of what the users can access.

Here’s a link to Windows Steady State 2.5 from Microsoft’s download site.
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=4310

After downloading and installing Windows Steady State. Go to the control panel in Windows, select Users and create a basic windows account.

Log-in to the basic account you’ve just created so windows can prep the account.

Now log back-in to the Administrator account in windows and launch Windows Steady State.

Under user settings, click on that account.

The main categories in Windows Steady state are to manage things your employees can access on the computer like the hard drives, programs and features. The second category allows you to control access in Internet Explorer like access to specific websites, downloads and access to Internet Explorer settings. And the third gives you access to block programs from running from the restricted account.

So, if you have employees that should only have access to POS software or business related web page and you have bookkeepers that use that computer that need access to their accounting software, try windows steady state to control that access and make sure everyone is using the computer for it’s intended use in the business.