Filed under: Security, Windows, Productivity, How-Tos
The shortcut to locking your Windows desktop
by Grant Robertson Jun 25th 2007 at 3:30PM
Here's a neat trick for those of you with a paranoid need to lock down your workstation on a regular basis. Sure, you could hit Ctrl-Alt-Del and click "Lock Workstation" but, that's a multi-keystroke + mouse kind of operation. Hackaback writes with a better and quicker way. Create a new shortcut anywhere you like on your desktop, and instead of giving the target to an application or document, use this: "rundll32 user32.dll, LockWorkStation". Name it what you will -- "Lock me!" comes to mind -- and you'll have a double-clickable icon that will instantly lock up your valuable data.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
rothgar said 3:33PM on 6-25-2007
was Win+L really that hard?
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crow said 3:35PM on 6-25-2007
@rothgar: I was on the brink to write the very same comment, but you beat me! :D
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Woody said 4:06PM on 6-25-2007
3rd'd
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Tristan said 4:32PM on 6-25-2007
4th.
I think it's easier to just hit Win+L than have to get to the icon and then double click
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polyphony said 4:40PM on 6-25-2007
How to make easy things hard. It remembers me when I saw in the daily wtf a program to execute things in console by moving the mouse to click "Start" and then "Execute". There is a function to do it by code.
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Sam said 4:44PM on 6-25-2007
4th'd. Really. With sorry ass KB's (old laptops) with no Win key, though, you can still go C+A+D and Enter.Using your mouse to minimize to desktop (Remember, no Win key) and then clicking on the shortcut would take more time. Unless you put it on your quick launch. But really, C+A+D+Enter.
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VitaminCM said 5:52PM on 6-26-2007
Must be an engineer. Overengineering something elegant that already existed.
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RP said 7:14PM on 6-25-2007
Although Win-L doesn't work on Win2000, if anyone still runs that.
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Dan Warne said 8:04PM on 6-25-2007
Or.... you could press Windows Key + L :-)
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Colin said 12:29AM on 6-26-2007
@Everyone else:
You all beat me to Win-L, damnit!
This article *does* have some uses though. At work, I've created the aforementioned shortcut and set it as a Scheduled Task; set it to run when your computer has been idle for five minutes, and it will auto-lock. (I suppose this can be done with the screen saver panel, but I have my screen saver disabled.)
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Taomyn said 4:10AM on 6-26-2007
Slow news day eh!
I expect this sort of lame article from idiots posting to Digg (not that I dislike Digg), but here?
As Hans Moleman would say: "you stole 2 minutes of my life"
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Chaval said 12:33PM on 6-26-2007
LOL!!!
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Monoto said 1:11PM on 6-26-2007
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Win+L. We get it. And for all us keyboard fanatics/mouse haters, Win+L works great. But there are those times when a clickable shortcut does just the trick.
I keep my shortcut in the Quick Launch toolbar so that I don't have to minimize everything to get to the Desktop. The shortcut also comes in handy when I'm using VNC to remotely connect to my PC so I can lock it when I'm done (Win+L typically locks the workstation I'm at, not the one I'm connected to).
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David said 6:16PM on 6-26-2007
I have extra keys (Web, Search, Mail, Calculator)along the top of my keyboard, and I remapped one of them to lock the workstation. One tap (without even looking) as I walk away, and the machine is locked. Most keyboards with these sorts of "extra" keys allow custom mapping through the software that comes with them.
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