BeyondTrust has just come out with a white paper entitled “90% of Critical Microsoft Windows 7 Vulnerabilities are Mitigated by Eliminating Admin Rights”. This paper has some very interesting statistics around the percentages of security issues that are mitigate if a users is not running as administrator. • 90% of Critical Windows 7 vulnerabilities reported to date • 100% of…

One of the features in Windows 7 that is sadly lacking are any Group Policies that can be used to configure an IT administrator to configure is the Libraries feature. Well an article on the Bink.nu web has started a wish list for new features to be include with Service Pack 1 and one is the ability to configured libraries…

Microsoft have just released a hotfix (KB980959) to fix the problem with the “Configured new tab page default behaviour” group policy setting not working for Internet Explorer 8. Apparently the Intetres.admx had the wrong path configured path is configured to “Software\Policies\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main” where it should be configured to “Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TabbedBrowsing\NewTabbedPageShow”. If you want to see the setting for your self…

Just stumbled across this Microsoft KB that seem like a fairly common problem that may affect anyone who tries to apply a desktop wallpaper to a Windows 7 computer via Group Policy. Description: In an Active Directory domain network environment, you apply a “Desktop Wallpaper” Group Policy setting to the domain users. However, the setting is not applied to domain…

The Ask the Performance Team has published a WMI Code Creator tool that allows queries your local WMI repository on your computer. This too can be useful if you want to find the WMI values to use with a WQL query filter for your Group Policy Objects (GPO). The tool itself does not actually create a WQL query for WMI…

Microsoft has just released a new TechNet Subscription discount code for any IT Pro that wants to evaluate and test Microsoft software. This is a great way to get your hands on and test Microsoft software for a business to make sure its the right solution for your needs. If you are a Group Policy Administrator this is a great…

As I have previously mentioned there has been a lot of press lately where some hackers took advantage of some holes in IE and Adobe Reader to hack Google’s systems in China. As a result Microsoft have burnt the midnight oil and rushed out an Out of Cycle patch for Internet Explorer to resolve this issues even thought this issues…

Microsoft just released two new hot fixes for the Group Policy Preferences (GPP) client-side extensions and the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC). Group Policy preferences client-side extension hotfix rollup for Windows Vista This hotfix resolves numerous issues with the client-side extensions for Vista and required Service Pack 1 or 2 to be installed. Download from http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=977983 You cannot create a…