If you’re using a shared Computer without any user accounts created, then you may want to block new software installations installed by others on your Computer or its a tough to job block programs installed by other users in your network, meet InstallGuard a freeware application blocking program which uses process detection technology to block installation of unauthorized software on your Computer.
After installing InstallGuard, launch it from desktop, this program with intuitive UI offers various tabs to configure the program. From Installed software tab, you can able to monitor new software installation attempts and then able to find which user has tried to install unauthorized software on your PC.
Track all software installations
This program takes a snapshot of all installed apps on your computer on system startup and after the first run. This snapshot text file can be found under Snapshot history of Installed Software tab. This programs takes snapshot for every 60 minutes. InstallGuard sends changes to change tracking log which can be found in ‘Change tracking ‘tab which reveals changes between last two snapshots like: which program has added and which was removed.
Detects installers and blocks unauthorized processes
This program detects and blocks installations initialized by installers such as Microsoft installer (msiexec), InstallShield and other commercial installer. InstallGuard also blocks processes that have common name ‘setup’ in them. You can add some custom processes such as executable with out extension by their name like browsers, toolbars, tools, chatting software to process detection list so that they also will be blocked from running on your computer.
Whitelist users: Allow authorized users and system admins to install software or allow any process without any problems. User Whitelist>Manage Whitelist>add user one by one.
InstallGuard monitors for new software installations in these locations: Desktop, Documents, Music Pictures, Videos and internet cache. When anyone tries to install a new program with InstallGuard installed, that program setup will be blocked and warning shows on screen to the user with the message” your System administrator has disabled option to install any software on this computer per company Policy”.
‘System Lockdown’ tab provides more options to disable Task Manager, Command Prompt, and registry Editor to prevent others from trying smart ways to install software.
SQL Server Compact installation is mandatory
To install this program, you first need to install SQL Server compact 3.5 sp1 on your computer (you can download and install SQL Server compact 3.5 Sp2 from Microsoft website where download link for SP1 not found on Microsoft website), you’ll also get the error for SQL Server when InstallGuard setup tries to download it.