Registry Tweak – Enabling/Disabling the Task Manager

By Luke

As I promised in the Using the registry post, here is a registry tweak which you could use to disable your task manager. First of all read this post on how to backup the registry, it is always important to backup the registry before modifying it just in case.

I will describe how to perform this tweak in a few steps.

1.Open the registry – Open Start > Run > Type ‘regedit’.

2.Locate the location in the registry to place the data – In the left Tree-view windows navigate to “HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionPoliciesSystem”, if any of the keys (directories) are missing create it. If they are all there skip to step 4.

3.Create a key – if for example “Policies” is missing, right click “current version” and select new key.

4.Right-click “System” and select new DWORD value.

5.Rename the value to “disabletaskmgr”.

6.Double click the value and type 1 for the value data.

7.Close the registry, now test it.

8.Hold Ctrl, Alt and Del, you’ll get a message saying the Task manager is disabled by ‘your administrator”.

9.To enable the task manager again, open the registry and delete the value or replace the value data with “0”.

This tweak is particularly useful because some viruses disable your task manager; if you need to enable it, using the steps above you could do so.

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