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Posted in Other Site Links

What are Group Policy Preferences

Group Policy Preferences have been out for about 3 years now and so there have been a number web posts about what they are and how they are implemented. So I have created a list of links to other articles that from the Group Policy Team Blog and ohter places that help explain what Preference are and how you can use…

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Posted in News

Hotfix: The "Desktop Wallpaper" Group Policy setting is not applied in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Posted in Video

Jeremy Moskowitz on the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit

Recently, the SPECOPS Software roadshow "Changes, Challenges and Choices When rolling out Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7" made its way to the Microsoft Alpharetta office in the US. The featured speaker was Jeremy Moskowitz of GPanswers.com. During the break John Baker had the opportunity to sit down with Jeremy and get a quick interview. You can learn more…

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