Enable or Disable Control Panel and Windows Settings App

Anyone with access to the Control Panel and Windows Settings App can carry out many tasks on the system, especially when you are using the system in a public place. In this article, I will show you How to Enable or Disable Control Panel and Windows Settings App. You may also want to read about How to Disable Touchpad on Windows 11, How to Disable device encryption on Windows, How to Disable Copilot in Windows and Microsoft Edge, and How to Disable Integrated Graphics on Windows.

Below is a YouTube video discussing the topic on how to enable or disable these features on Windows systems.

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Why Disable Control Panel or Windows Settings App?

Note: Sometimes a guest may use your computer and you will not like it when the guest changes your computer settings.

In an organization, part of the Sys Admin functions is to guide against the misuse of the Control Panel and Windows Settings App, which may expose the system to attacks and can negatively affect the corporate network. To avoid these issues, you may consider enabling or disabling the Control Panel and Windows Settings App as necessary.

What you can do to guide against this misuse is to restrict or disable the Control Panel and Settings App.

Please note that before you apply the steps below create a restore point that can help restore the system back to functional state.

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1. Using Registry Editor

1. Open registry editor by running regedit:

2. Lets now navigate to the following location on the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

3. Right-click on Explorer then navigate to New > DWORD (32-bit) value.

4. Enter NoControlPanel as the new DWORD and hit Enter. This will help you enable or disable Control Panel and Windows Settings App based on the value you provide.

5. Double-click on the DWORD NoControlPanel and give it a value to 1 then click OK.

The above steps is for local users the next step we are going to do is for local machine.

6. Lets navigate to the following registry location and follow the same steps:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer

Change the DWORD value to 1 too.

Immediately you complete these configurations you should not be able to access the Control Panel again and you will see the below restrictions message.

But if there is still access then you will need to restart the system to ensure the changes are effected.

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Create DWORD value

7. Incase you want to return to the settings back, just follow the same steps and delete the DWORD “NoControlPanel“.

Make sure you right-click the correct DWORD and select delete and click Yes.

2. Using Group Policy Editor

1. Open registry editor by running gpedit.msc:

3. Navigate to this location: User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel

4. Select Control Panel and in the right pane policy settings double-click on “Prohibit access to Control Panel and PC settings". To control user access, you can enable or disable Control Panel and Windows Settings App through this policy.

5. Under this policy settings select Enabled and click OK.

You will need to restart your system to make the configuration work.

After rebooting your system and you try to access Control Panel or Windows Setting you see this message “This operation has been canceled due to restrictions in effect on this computer. Please contact your system administrator.”

If you want to revert the configuration, it is just to select Not configured on the policy settings.

I hope you found this blog post about how to enable or disable Control Panel and Windows Settings App helpful. Please let me know in the comment section if you have any questions.