Disable all but Microsoft Word

How best to disable everything on a laptop except Word and ability to send to printer? An elderly friend who is disabled and only has the use of one hand wants to write letters on the computer, but her old Windows XP keeps giving her pop ups for various things and trying to force updates and actions on her, things that she does not know how to deal with. I am essentially trying to turn this thing into a word processor for her. I've disabled everything I dare to including internet access. Would a restore to factory with limitation work?

 

you cannot disable everything as a lot of windows xp is integrated with other components.

you can use the black viper website to see what services can be turned off

 

reply no. 2: you can also uninstall all 3rd party programs, and just use word pad which is under accessories in the all programs list, then install your printer and there should be no problem, you would not have to install any word programs, you can do quite a bit with word pad:

https://www.google.com/#q=how+to+use+wordpad+in+xp

many tutorials listed above on how to use word pad.

 

There is a possibility that you could set Microsoft Word as the default shell. So you would login and only Word would appear on top of an otherwise blank desktop.

 

https://realtimeissues.wordpress.co...-to-set-one-program-as-windows-shell-program/

 

All good suggestions. I will give them a try. Thanks!

 

I for the life of me cannot remember the name but Microsoft made a software program for XP/Vista that would allow you to completely lock down EVERYTHING you want on the computer that you want.


If nobody remembers, maybe just delete all of the start menu entries except for Word. Then, disable updates. Disable pop up warnings for updates, and uninstall everything in the extra programs area of the program manager. (I forget right now what its called). You can uninstall IE and all browsers too.

 

Yeah, but setting as the replacement shell will prevent destroying the Start Menu

 

I think you will need XPLite Pro to really uninstall IE. So far as I know, all Windows operating systems will lie to you and say that you successfully uninstalled a component, when the OS really just concealed it (and maybe disabled it).

 

AFAIK, you cannot uninstall IE even if you wanted to.....because to the best of my knowledge it is so tightly integrated with File Explorer that you'd brick the system if you managed it. So, I suspect trimis is probably correct on that one.

Mike.

 

Actually you can uninstall IE via XPLite Pro, but you're right, doing so takes out a lot of components. Everything that calls home to the Microsoft mothership cannot anymore, and some will not survive that. As I recall, you have to have all your accounts (administrator, limited, etc.) in place, because when IE bites the dust you cannot create accounts anymore. If anyone is really interested I can look for the thread over at WildersSecurity, and give the link that discusses the nittygritty.