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…

I was recently approached to do a book review on “Least Privilege Security for Windows 7,Vista and XP by Russell Smith” published by Packt Publishing. This book is a comprehensive guide at showing how to configure your Windows environment so that your users can operate without administrator permissions. While most administrators realise that giving administrators access to the end users…

The beta of Windows 7/Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 beta has now been released to the public for testing. For your benefit I have parsed through the complete list of hotfixes and I have listed out all the group policy specific setting. If you just want the service pack right now you can download it here http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/ff183870.aspx I have…

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…

In this weeks setting I look at a new Windows 7 setting that reverts the sort order of folders back to the old way it would sort files and folder the same as Windows 2000 (and earlier). This policy setting is called “Turn off numerical sorting in Windows Explorer and can be found under User Configuration > Policies > Administrative…

The setting of the week is called “Remove the Action Center icon” and as the name says it  is used to remove the Action Center icon (a.k.a. Flag) from the system tray (see below). You might want to enable this setting if you are in a corporate environment and you centrally managed Backups, Firewall and Updates using other programs. However…

Just found out about a few more hot fixes that Microsoft recently released for Group Policy. KB979621 A removable storage device is disabled when you enable a Group Policy to deny write access or to deny read access to the device on a computer that is running Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 Fixes an issues with removable storage devices…