Group Policy is of course one of the best ways you can lockdown and configure your windows systems in your environment and one of the most commonly configured setting in Group Policy is the ability to configured the Desktop Wallpaper (a.k.a. Background) image. Now most of you might just say is all you need to do is set the  group…

Microsoft have just announced they will allow small business with less that 10 seats to use Microsoft Security Essentials for free. But even having to configured 10 copies of Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) can be a pain so below is a quick tutorial on how you can Group Policy Enable Microsoft Security Essentials. Update: Microsoft have now updated their Microsoft…

On my recent trip to New Zealand to speak a TechEd 2010 I managed to record a podcast with Richard Campbell for the RunAs Radio podcast. The conversation explores how group policy can now be used to map drives, printers and other features, leading to the virtual elimination of login scripts. If you would like to listen to the podcast…

Microsoft has now released to the public (download it here) the newest version of Internet Explorer 9 Beta to the public. If you want to know more about the new features in IE9 then i recommend that you check out http://www.beautyoftheweb.com/ to see some of the fantastic stuff that this browser enables. If the new functionality alone is not enough…

This is a video of my Group Policy Preferences session I presented in TechEd New Zealand… I had a really good time during this session and the feedback I got from the session was really positive. In this session I introduced Group Policy Preferences and showed a number of demo’s as to how it can be used in your environment…

During Kevin Sullivan Group Policy session at TechEd 2010 in the USA this year he mentioned an example of a being able to configure group policy to allow users to select whatever screensaver they want except the one called “(None)” (see image below). While this method does not prevent the users from select the (None) from the screensaver options list…

A Google Engineer recently irresponsibly disclosed to the public after only warning Microsoft 5 days earlier of a vulnerabilities that allows a malicious third-party to take advantage of a security issue with the Help and Support Center in Windows XP/2003 after. As a result this has left many users (and organisations) open to attack using this exploit. Thankfully Microsoft have quickly…