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…

This weeks group policy setting on the week is one that most IT administrators will probably want to implement. Now for personal use the Windows logon sound is quite nice however when you have an office packed with computers it can sound like a symphony in the morning as everyone turns on their computer. This is a new policy setting…

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…

This is another article I have written that address’s the commonly asked question on the Group Policy forum as to how you can use group policy to block or allow users to specific web site URL’s. It goes without saying that the most effective way to implement content filtering for the internet is to maintain list of sites on your…

The setting of the week this week prevents users from running Windows Media Center on Vista or above versions. Unlike Windows XP which had its own dedicated version of Media Center, Vista Enterprise and Ultimate editions and Windows 7 Business, Enterprise and Ultimate had inbuilt support Windows Media Center. This setting would most likely be used in a corporate environment…

The group policy setting for the week this week is a new policy setting for Windows 7/2008 R2. This setting is called “Prevent changing mouse pointers” and can be found under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization. This setting is handy if you want to tightly control the user environment such as public access…

(Wow… I have been doing this for 6 months now… how time flies… ) This weeks setting of the week is another old one however it is very important for any environment that is still running Windows XP SOE. The “Do not allow Windows Messenger to be run” will prevent any user from running Windows Messenger that comes out of…

Back to another profile setting this week and this one can save any organisation using Windows Vista or greater a lot of time if you manual provision your accounts. The setting is called “Set roaming profile path for all users logging onto this computer” and it configures the users roaming profile path that is normally configured on a per account…