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…

Windows Desktop Search 4.0 is a fantastic local search engine for Windows XP that allows users to quickly search all their local files and network file servers. This is also a requirement for anyone that want to use the instant search feature in Outlook 2007 as it utilises this search engine to perform an index of your inbox. However as…

(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…

I used to think that it was not possible to set IP address information via Group Policy however I did some checking this week and was pleased to find that there was a way to configure your computers DNS Server addresses. Unfortunately this setting only applies to Windows XP, however lots of people still use XP so it is still…

In my previous article “How to use Group Policy to make USB drives read only on Windows XP” I showed you you could configure Windows XP to prevent users from writing to USB block level devices. However for some organisations just making drives read only is not enough I have heard stories of them having to resort to using hot…

One of the great new features with Windows 7 was Bitlocker to Go that enabled IT Administrators to ensure that all data written to USB drives is encrypted. In conjunction with this new feature Microsoft also added another option called “Deny write access to removable drives not protected by BitLocker” which allowed user to still read the files off USB…

Ever wondered why the behaviour of Group Policy Preferences Power Plan never worked the way you expected? Well Ned Pyle from Microsoft has written a really good article explaining this behaviour. http://blogs.technet.com/askds/archive/2009/12/11/windows-xp-power-management-and-group-policy-preferences.aspx