This weeks (and first for the year) Group Policy Setting of the Week is a Group Policy setting that configures Group Policy. The “Group Policy refresh interval for computers” can be found under Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > Group Policy and is used to control how often the background computer refresh interval of a performed.

By default the refresh will happen every 90 minutes however it has a 30 minute random offset so it could potentially take between 1 to 2 hours for a policy refresh to occur. Keep in mind however that if configured the policy refresh to a shorter interval it will potentially not take affect to all your computers until the longest refresh interval of the last refresh interval setting. Normally this setting it set to a short interval before a major change to group policy setting is made to an SOE so that any rollback of the change can be implemented faster (example see How to use Group Policy Preferences to set change Passwords).