I'm looking for an option to deny a user the ability disable microphone on a laptop running Windows 7.
I've tried to set DENY permission on the microphone setting in the registry, but it doesn't work.
I'm looking for an option to deny a user the ability disable microphone on a laptop running Windows 7.
I've tried to set DENY permission on the microphone setting in the registry, but it doesn't work.
Can I deny a user the ability to disable the microphone in Windows 7?
No, you cannot. (Nor can you do it in any other OS.) You would need custom hardware where the microphone is hardened against interference or tampering, and isolated from interaction with a user to even begin to address this. And even that wouldn't solve your problem.
There's no way to protect the microphone from someone who has physical access to the machine. They can plug speakers into the microphone jack, interfere with the electrical signal (like by placing a cell phone on top of the mic), muffle the sound by smushing a pillow up against it, give you fake audio data by playing a recording of static on a handheld tape recorder, and God only knows what else. There is simply no way to solve this problem from a technical angle - even with custom, hardened hardware, a pillow or a recording of static (or garbled, staticy-speech) would render all that hardware useless.
This is a personnel problem. Fix it at that level - it sounds like you guys need to hire better people... or at least, people less inclined to rip you off. As suggested in the comments, having the policy changed so that surveys without proper audio data are considered invalid is probably your easiest and cheapest option. If not, submitting faked surveys is [probably] a criminal offense (fraud would be the applicable statute in most places), and assuming these are corporate laptops, you can use monitoring and logging software to catch the lazier offenders. If not, well, you can do your detective work the old fashioned-way... or maybe just accept that people cheating you is part of life.
Whatever you decide on, preventing users from disabling the microphones through the operating system will solve exactly nothing, so you need to decide on a different approach to this problem.