Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to configure home page settings – Part 2

In part 2 of how to use Group Policy to configure a users home page I will be show you how to use Group Policy Preferences to configure a users home page. There really isn’t a right way you can set the users home pages setting it is really up to your requirements and how much control you want to…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to turn off the Backup Notification in the Windows 7 Actions Center

UPDATE: Since I published this article Microsoft published an new MSDN article showing a simple registry key that can turn this backup notification. Therefore please go to this article “How to use Group Policy to turn off Backup Notification in the Windows 7 Action Center – The Easier Way . ” for the best way to turn off this notification. One of…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to restore missing second printer in Windows 7

Aamer Shedam from Microsoft’s Ask the Performance Team has just blogged about how Windows 7 will only show one printer in “Devices and Printers” if you have that same two printers installed on the one computer (see below). If your an IT Administrator and you want to configured the “Printer” view in Windows Explorer to show an icon for each…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to disable the EU Browser Choice

In case you had not already heard Microsoft have had to release an update for all European users to prompt display a ballot screen about what version of browser they want to use (see below). This is one of the actions Microsoft had to do to comply with the EU anti-trust case. Microsoft have released article KB2019411 explaining how IT…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Tutorials

Updated: How to download and install the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC)

One of the common task that Group Policy administrators need to do is download and install the Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) on their computer to allow them to make changes to Group Policy. This tool is by default not installed on Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7. Below I first go through the Windows 7 and then the…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to configure home page settings – Part 1

One of the most common setting that Group Policy is used for it so configure browser home pages settings. There are a number of ways that this can be done in Part 1 i am going to go thought the changing the Home Page setting using a native Group Policy. In Part 2 I will explain how to configure home…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Best Practice Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to disable USB drives on Windows XP

In my previous article “How to use Group Policy to make USB drives read only on Windows XP” I showed you you could configure Windows XP to prevent users from writing to USB block level devices. However for some organisations just making drives read only is not enough I have heard stories of them having to resort to using hot…

Continue Reading...
Posted in Tutorials

How to use Group Policy to Enabled/Disable Outlook 2010 Social Connector (a.k.a. People Pane)

There is an awesome new feature coming in Outlook 2010 call the Outlook Social Connector (a.k.a. People Pane) that allows you to view all the recent relevant status updates and emails from that person. This feature also enables third parties (i.e. Facebook, Twitter & Linkedin) to make connectors so that the view can contain information from a variety of sources….

Continue Reading...