In the July 29 to August 12th Hot-fix release for Windows 6/7 there have been a number of Group Policy related hotfixes released. As far as I can tell none of these hotfixes are listed as being in Windows 7 Service Pack 1 that is currently in beta (see The complete list of Group Policy Hotfix’s in Windows 7/2008 R2…

Last week I was a guest on the Australia IT Pro podcast called the “Coalface Tech Podcast” where I spoke on the topic of Group Policy. I was joined by regular team members, including Matt Marlor, Steve Molkentin, Simone Bennett and Nicholas Rayner and we talked about pretty much all things Group Policy, including preferences, AGPM and I even when…

Services are programs that are configured to run in the background of a Windows computer weather or not there is a users that is logged on. They are essential part of windows and are essential to the operation of any windows computers. Without services computer could not perform automatic updates, run scheduled tasks or even connect to a file share….

The setting of the week this week disables one of the features in Windows 7 that allowed users to pin programs to the taskbar. This option will be handy if you are in an environment where you want to prevent users from customising the taskbar such as a kiosk or library style computer. The setting can be found under User…

This week setting of the week is called “Change Start Menu power button” which allows you to configured the start menu shutdown button in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. You can find this setting under User Configurations>Policies>Administrative Templates>StartMenu and Taskbar. If you have setup your computer to support Hybrid-Sleep then you should consider configuring this option to help…

Update: Microsoft have now released the patch to the .lnk vulnerability MS10-046: Vulnerability in Windows Shell could allow remote code execution . If you have previously deployed the workaround using this article then it is now time to reverse the change you made by simple jumping to Removing the KB2286198 Workaround via Group Policy section and following the instructions. Needless…

This year I will be presenting 2 Group Policy session at TechEd Australia and TechEd New Zealand . I am super excited to be co-presenting these session with fellow Group Policy MVP Jeremy Moskowitz who has literally wrote the book on Group Policy.  You are of course going to be attending my session however if you want to see what…

A new hotfix (KB2171141) is out from Microsoft that resolves an issues with the IE8 search provider when applying the “Prevent Internet Explore Search box from displaying” is enabled (see image below). This policy will remove remove the search box from Internet Explorer (see image below). But then when a user logs on to the computer for the first time…