Secure Lockdown ($14.95-$29.95) is a quick and easy way to turn your computer into a “kiosk PC”, a system which runs only the applications you specify.

If you run a business and would like customers to be able to browse some demonstration software, for instance, you probably don’t want them to be able to close that program, Alt+Tab to something else, log out or otherwise mess things up – and that’s where Secure Lockdown can help.

Setup is straightforward, and at a minimum is little more than choosing the applications you’ll allow to be run.

Reboot your PC with Secure Lockdown enabled and the user is able to access your whitelist of applications from a launcher.

This is where “smart” users might be tempted to run something else, but Secure Lockdown does its best to stop them, removing the Start button and menu, desktop icons, Explorer access, Task Manager, Ctrl+Alt+Del functions, Win+R launcher, right-click menu and more.

Even smarter users could launch a target application, then click File > Open to try and browse the file system that way. But Secure Lockdown has that covered, too, blocking access to local drives and disabling the right-click menu.

Disable key Windows features in a click or two

There’s still scope for simple PC vandalism, like resizing an application window, moving it mostly off the screen, closing it entirely. But again, there are options to restart a closed applications or keep it maximised.

Secure Lockdown can also be used to lock down Internet Explorer or Chrome, where it’s able to remove particular menu bars or options, block specific browser tasks (download, open, printing), even restrict browsing to certain websites.

Some of these restrictions might get in your way, perhaps stop some of your applications from working, but Secure Lockdown is very configurable. Most features can be enabled or disabled by clicking a checkbox.

There are many other ways to lock down a PC. If your computer is only ever going to be used as a kiosk then you could do something similar by applying standard policy restrictions, removing Windows components, deleting executables you don’t want others to access, and so on.

Secure Lockdown’s key advantage is ease of use. You don’t have to figure which policies to set, because the program does it for you. And crucially, it can be enabled or disabled in a few seconds, ideal if you only need a kiosk PC occasionally.

Secure Lockdown is a commercial application which runs on Windows XP and later.