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Locking Keyboard and Mouse During Deployment

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support

Hi,

I'm looking for something that will lock the end user's keyboard and mouse during deployment so we can then install a package and once the package is installed, the keyboard and mouse are unlocked. Preferably a message would also be displayed on the machine stating that updates/an installation is taking place. Has anybody managed to accomplish this within PDQ Deploy?

Note: I tested some reg key changes (after Admin Arsenal suggested this) but this didn't work - thedecoderwheel.com/2011/03/12/disable-mouse-and-keyboard-during-deployment-success/

Thanks

Simon

 

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  • Avatar
    mmuni

    What I ended up doing was writing some AutoIT scripts that I could then easily execute on the remote machines. I made three, one to disable user input (Mouse/Keyboard), one to enable user input, and one that displays a full screen message to the user.

    I allowed two variables to be passed to the splash_screen script, a timeout and a message. I have found that just displaying the message seems to be enough to stop the users and enable/disable user input is not really needed.

     

    Here is an example of starting the splash_screen.exe:

    START \\ServerName\ShareLocation\splash_screen.exe 60 "Installing Updates - Do not turn this computer off."

     

    This would display the message "Installing Updates - Do not turn this computer off." on the remote computers screen with a timeout of 60 minutes. The reason I include the 60 minute timeout is just in case the deployment fails on one of the step the user is not permanently locked out of using the computer.

     

    the last stop in your package would then be the following to get rid of the message on the screen. 

    taskkill /f /im Splash_Screen.exe

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  • Avatar
    mmuni

    Tip: setup a package that just starts the splash screen and then a second package that kills the splash screen. You can then easily add them to the beginning and end of other packages as a nested package step.

     

    The biggest problem I have come across is that you cant really incorporate this in a good way with Auto Deployment Packages.

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