Hello,

I work at a school that runs about sixty Toshiba Satellite Pro M10
laptops. As anyone who has worked on school computers can probably
testify, the kids have a tendency to try and probe where they
shouldn't, and one area of particular concern is them getting into the
laptop BIOS and password-locking the machine, rendering it unusable by
anyone else. I have looked at the password setups in the BIOS, and it
seems to be impossible to set it up so that the machine will boot
without a password, but also have access to the BIOS restricted by a
password. Setting up a password requires that password to be entered to
boot the machine, as does setting up the HDD password. There must be
some way to set up the machine so that it boots normally with no need
for a password, but only allows the BIOS setup to be entered with a
password. This is quite an urgent concern, as at least one pupil has
already discovered how to lock a laptop so nobody else can use it (and
my efforts to unlock it with a DIY parallel dongle have not worked thus
far - I shudder to think of the cost of sending a whole class full of
laptops away for unlocking).

Matt
====

MattPG wrote:
Set the Supervisor Password in the Toshiba console.

Only locks the BIOS.

Regards,

James

MattPG wrote:
I know it's irrelevant to your problem, but laptops, IMO, are much too
fragile for school use. You will have a nightmare on your hands keeping
these operable. The points of failure will be the keyboards, quite
possibly the cooling systems, and anything whatsoever that hangs from
any port and the ports themselves. The worst will be the LCDs that
will be cracked, scratched, inked, bent, and any other damage
conceivable - and they are of the order of $700+ to fix with a downtime
of weeks. I estimate the lifetime of a laptop in a school environment
at no more than six months at the outside.

I hope, for the sake of the taxpayers, that the laptops were free.

Q

Yeah, I have to agree with you, but it wasn't my decision (the purchase
order was already made before I even started work in the IT department,
and even then the IT manager's opinion on the subject was basically
ignored). I just have to keep the things running (along with all the
desktop computers in the school too).

Matt
====

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion. Doing this, along with setting the user
permissions in the Toshiba utility seems to have done the trick,
meaning a password now needs to be entered only to enter the BIOS setup
screen (I wish the Toshiba manuals had been a bit clearer on that
point...)

Matt
====


me/2 wrote:
[snip]