Windows has a cool feature that allows you to tell if your computer has Internet connectivity when you are connected to a network (see image below). This feature is called Network Connectivity Status Indicator (NCSI) it uses a combination of DNS and/or HTTP look ups to tell if you are connected to the Internet. The way does this is either…

This setting is another profile related setting however I think the focus is warranted as so many organisations use roaming profiles. This setting is called “Prevent Roaming Profile changes from propagating to the server” and can be found under  Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > User Profiles and like the previous setting work on Windows XP…

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…

This week I have decided to chose “Add the Administrator security group to roaming users profiles” as the setting of the week. This setting can be found under “Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > System > User Profiles” and applied to Windows XP / 2003 or later. This setting adds the administrator ACL to the users roaming profile…

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….

This weeks setting is another is another oldie but a goodie that is commonly used to lock down SOE’s so that users can use the registry editor. It is called “Prevent access to registry editing tools” which us a user setting found under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Template > System and will work on all platforms since Windows…

The Ask the Performance Team has published a WMI Code Creator tool that allows queries your local WMI repository on your computer. This too can be useful if you want to find the WMI values to use with a WQL query filter for your Group Policy Objects (GPO). The tool itself does not actually create a WQL query for WMI…

This weeks setting of the week is a double header but they are really simple but so commonly used that they really have to be mentioned. The first setting is found under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization > Prevent changing desktop background. As the name suggest this setting prevents users from changing the…