Want to prevent standard users from deleting printers on Windows 10?
Printers might be one of the ultimate unglamorous office appliances that are boxy and boring. But imagine reaching your breaking point right before giving an important professional presentation. Moments before the presentation, you attempt to print your typed notes only to find out that someone has deleted the printer on your Windows 10.
Is there anything you could have done to avoid this unfortunate situation?
Yes, you could have prevented standard users from deleting printers on Windows 10.
In this guide, we will walk you through some easy methods of preventing standard users from deleting printers on Windows 10, so you can put an end to this threat once and for all.
Let’s get started.
1. Use the Group Policy Editor.
If you have dug into the more technical corners of Windows, you may have come across the Group Policy Editor.
Windows comes with several administrative-level programs that allow you to customize your operating system according to your own preferences. One such tool is the Group Policy Editor, which provides centralized management and configuration of operating systems.
Information about Windows programs and processes in the Group Policy Editor is stored in the form of policies and by modifying the relevant ones, you can make the desired changes.
Here is how you can use the Group Policy Editor to prevent standard users from deleting printers:
- Press Windows + R keys simultaneously on your keyboard to launch a Run dialogue box.
- Type ‘gpedit.msc‘ in the text field of the dialogue box and hit Enter to launch the Group Policy Editor.
- Once you are inside the Group Policy Editor, navigate to the location mentioned below.
User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Control Panel\Printers\
- In the right pane, locate and double-click on the Prevent deletion of printers option.
- Select Enabled and hit Apply/OK to save the changes.
- Now check if updating the policy helped you prevent standard users from deleting printers on Windows 10. If it did not, you would likely need to force the update, and for that, follow the steps in step 7 of the procedure.
- Type cmd in the search bar and click on Run as administrator. This will launch elevated Command Prompt on your screen.
- Inside the Command Prompt window, type the command mentioned below and hit Enter to execute it.
gpupdate /force
As simple as that!
This should prevent standard users from deleting printers in Windows 10.
2. Try Using CleanMyPC.
If our suggested solutions cannot help you, it may be that your system is infected with bugs or corruption errors that are preventing certain operations from working. In this situation, the best thing to do is to remove unnecessary files from your computer before getting into troubleshooting.
You can remove the junk files from your computer by using an efficient computer cleaner. If you do not already have one, we recommend trying CleanMyPC out.
CleanMyPC offers several system maintenance tools that handle a variety of PC-related issues, including junk file removal. With just a few clicks, it will automatically detect problems and fix them without the need for user intervention.
CleanMyPC is very easy to use too, so even if you’re a first-time user, you shouldn’t have any problems!
3. Use Windows Registry.
Windows Registry is another administrative-level tool that allows users to customize the operations of their operating system.
The information in Windows Registry is stored in the form of Registry keys, and Windows refers to this information when performing relevant tasks.
In this method, we will be modifying the printer keys to prevent standard users from changing the settings.
Here is what you need to do:
- Press Windows + R keys simultaneously on your keyboard to launch a Run dialogue box.
- Type ‘regedit‘ in the text field of the dialogue box and hit Enter to launch the Group Policy Editor.
- Inside Windows Registry, navigate to the location mentioned below.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
- If you cannot locate the Explorer key, right-click on Policies and select New > Key option.
- Rename this key as Explorer and double-click on it.
- Now right-click anywhere in the right pane and select New > DWORD (32-bit) Value option.
- Rename this value as NoDeletePrinter and double-click on it.
- Under Value data, type 1 and hit Enter to save the changes.
That is it.
Doing so will make the desired changes successfully.
This brings us to the end of our guide on preventing standard users from changing printers in Windows 10. We tried walking you through all the steps in detail and hope that one of the methods mentioned above did the trick for you. In case you still have any confusion about the methods, please let us know in the comment section below!
If this guide helped you, please share it. 🙂
