How to Lock obsolete TeamProjects

As part of a maintenance, I was about to Lock several now-obsolete TeamProjects, by right-clicking on each one's root in Source Control Explorer ($/TeamProject) and selecting "Lock..".

Once I was done, I tried to commit these changes, which was denied with the following message:

By searching around I bumped into the following statement, made as part of this discussion:

Locks are applied such that the user who places the lock can checkin/checkout files but noone else can until the lock is released. So as a more valid test you will need another user to attempt a check-in of a locked file - ie not you because you put the lock on.

If this statement stands, using 'Lock' was all together not what I should have gone for.

What I actually need is to close down older TeamProjects so that no checkouts can occur anymore. How do I do that?

(I suppose I could include in my changeset a misc code change, but I 'd go for something like this only if there were no other options available)

As I understand selecting Lock allows you to check out the file in isolation. But doing so will show the project in pending changes window. And i guess this is not what you want.

Team Project Collections can be stopped from the TFS Administration console, however this functionality is not available for individual team Projects, you can vote for this feature here ... http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2485699-make-it-possible-to-disable-team-project

You could right click the team project and select security, change the permissions for the users to read only so they have no check in permissions.

HTH