Group Policy Setting of the Week 25 – Remove the Action Center icon

The setting of the week is called “Remove the Action Center icon” and as the name says it  is used to remove the Action Center icon (a.k.a. Flag) from the system tray (see below).

image

You might want to enable this setting if you are in a corporate environment and you centrally managed Backups, Firewall and Updates using other programs. However disabling this means that your users will not receive any alerts if the is some critically wrong with thier computer so please use this option after careful consideration.

If you decided that you don’t want to completely disable the Action Center and only disable certain alerts then check out my other post How to use Group Policy to turn off the Backup Notification in the Windows 7 Actions Center

image 

This is a user setting and can be found under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar and is of course only for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2.

Author: Alan Burchill

Microsoft MVP (Group Policy)

10 thoughts on “Group Policy Setting of the Week 25 – Remove the Action Center icon

  1. I have trouble to find this policy setting? Our DCs are mainly Windows server 2003 except with one 2008 R2 DC. I can’t find this policy setting on Windows 7 local policy but not on any domain wide group policy, any idea?

    Thanks,
    Ying

  2. I mean I can find this policy setting on Windows 7/Windows Server 2008 R2 local policy but I want to use domain wide policy apply to all Windows 7 machines?

    1. @Chris @Brent Some people like to lock down the UI of a desktop so users don’t go poking around. Doing this on terminal servers or VDI would be one senario i could see it being used.

Leave a Reply