Top GPO configs for your Windows 7 machines?

[gshaw]

Got our test machines running nicely at the moment after a painless imaging test with SCCM, currently using most of our current Windows GPO settings (apart from redirection) and all seems to be working pretty well and looks for the most part identical to our current XP setup

 

For reference what have you found to be the most useful \ important 7-specific GPOs you've enabled since migrating over?

[Michael]

I'd probably say compared to XP, there are GPOs to configure UAC in Windows Vista and 7, but also Point and Print Restrictions.

 

I would say also, use the FQDN and not NETBIOS. Windows 7 and 2008 R2 do seem to work 'better' with the FQDN. A typical example of this is mapping network drives using GPP and also the user's home directory.

 

And on the topic of GPOs, you can pretty much do away with scripts in Windows 7. The only two scripts I use are for deploying Sophos AV (if it's not installed it gets installed automatically), but also deploying wireless settings using the netsh wlan command.

 

There are lots of others, but those are the main ones I can think of

[Quackers]

Not a group policy as such, but i launch it as a logon script from their. In Windows 7 when you redirect the user folders you end up with duplicates when you click the users name on the start menu, so 2 desktop folders, 2 downloads folder etc, one to the local profile and 1 to the redirected path. So i run the following so it only shows the redirected one so the end user does not get confused. Since you have not done the folder redirect part yet it might come in handy for you.

 

cd %userprofile%

rmdir Favorites /s /q

rmdir Desktop /s /q

rmdir Contacts /s /q

rmdir Downloads /s /q

rmdir Links /s /q

rmdir "My Documents" /s /q

rmdir "My Music" /s /q

rmdir "My Videos" /s /q

rmdir "My Pictures" /s /q

rmdir "Saved Games" /s /q

rmdir "Searches" /s /q

rmdir Documents /s /q

rmdir Music /s /q

rmdir Videos /s /q

rmdir Pictures /s /q