Often when working with clients particularly in POS environments, they want to disable Internet Explorer from the computers or POS terminals.  This blog will show you the steps to take:

Disable the internet:

1. Open Internet Explorer
2. Select tools then internet options
3. Select the connections tab
4. Select Lan Settings button at the bottom of the screen
5. Under the proxy server section, place a check box in “use a proxy server for your LAN”
6. In the address box type in 127.0.0.1
7. Place a checkbox in “Bypass proxy server for local addresses

What this has done is setup a fake proxy server on your network which doesn’t go anywhere.  By doing this internet explorer cannot make any HTML connection to the internet.  If you ever need to re-enable the internet, simply uncheck the boxes.

Unfortunately this step may not be enough to keep them out.  Often time’s users can research the same things that we can and know how to go into the LAN settings and disable this feature.  So we also encourage clients to do one of the following based on what best fits their environment.

In a domain environment you can use a group policy group policy to remove the connections tab:

On the domain controller go to start, run

1. Type in gpedit.msc
2. Click on computer configuration
3. Click on administrative templates
4. Click on windows components
5. Click on internet explorer
6. Click on internet control panel
7. Select Disable the connections page and click enable
8. Click apply then OK
9. To change back, simply disable the feature

If you are not in a domain environment, you can do the following:

1. On the PC go to start, run, type in regedit
2. Go to my computer
3. Go to hkey_local_machine
4. Go to software
5. Go to Policies
6. Go to Microsoft
7. Go to Internet Explorer (or create key if necessary)
8. Go to Restrictions (or create key if necessary)
9. Select edit, new, and select DWORD Value
10. Rename the value to NoBrowserOptions
11. Change the value of the value data to 1
12. Close Internet Explorer and reopen it.  The user should not have access to internet options
13. To disable simply change the value to 0