maxvre

Hi Sebby, I haven't fully tested this but I believe it answers your question. The Microsoft Management Console allows you to create separate local GPOs for the computer, administrator/s and non-administrator users. Type mmc.exe in start/run and you can build a custom console. Go to File menu - add/remove snap-in. Scroll down the list that appears and select "Group Policy Object Editor". Click the ADD button. The default object is the local computer settings GPO that gets created. Select that and click FINISH to add it to the console. Now go and add group policy object editor again, this time click "BROWSE" and select the USERS tab. Now you can select "administrators" as the local GPO to be created. Click OK / Finish. Now do it again and this time select "non-administrators". Click OK / Finish. So now you have 3 local GPOs in the right window of your console. You can double click these and create separate group policy settings for administrators, non-administrators and the computer. Be sure to save your custom console in the administrative tools folder when logged in as an administrator. You'll be doing all this logged in as an administrator anyway so just click File / Save As. These local policies "should" be applied to the correct user groups upon local login. The actual GPO objects are created in a hidden group policy folder in the system32 folder. As I said you'll need to test this as I have seen it but never have had to use it as we use a domain/server set up instead of local policies.

Hi there, Part of the reason the default profile grows if building a reference machine is because the default location for %TEMP% and %TMP% is actually in the profile (APPDATA folder) and the contents of this folder gets copied to any newly created profiles if you dont empty it before running sysprep. It fills up because it is used by program installers to copy the installation files to temporarily during an install. The more programs you install on your reference machine the more files and msi installers are left behind in the temp folder of the default user profile. %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp Before you run sysprep be sure to delete everything inside this folder and you will see your profile size shrink dramatically. Also watch out for plugin msi installers that leave an msi backup file of themselves within the profile in case they need to "heal" themselves by doing a re-install/repair. Offenders include the Adobe Reader plugin and the Sun Java JRE or JDK. These guys copy 100+Mb msi files into your default profile appdata folder and balloon its size away up. If you have a fixed software profile for your student machines and you wont be repairing apps during term time etc then it is ok to delete these msi files from the appdata folder before running sysprep. It's worked for me to reduce the profile size from several hundred Mb's down to 55 Mb. ps I'm not talking about the temp folder above I'm talking about their respective installation folders under appdata. They are in either locallow or roaming, I can't remember which. Another tip I would give you to narrow down your slow logon would be to turn on the verbose logon / logoff status messages group policy. (It's in the computers section under system.) This will tell you what windows is doing in the background instead of just the "welcome" message and spinning circle. I find that "waiting for user profile service" and "preparing desktop" seem to take the longest time for new profiles being set up. Another issue I have seen is that user accounts with a network home folder take longer to log in (can be up to a minute longer) than an account with no network home folder. There is a group policy which is set to a 30 second wait by default for the network home folder to become available/ready. Reducing this value "may" reduce your logon time. I can't remember what exactly it is called right now sorry.

Hi, I'm not great with vb scripting but I know it can be done that way if you can program it. Instead, as I only know batch commands I use a program called wsname.exe it has command line switches: Workstation Name Changer With this you can read mac addresses and corresponding computer names from a text file and if the current machines mac address matches one in the list, the wsname program renames the hostname to the corresponding name you put in the list. You'll need to reboot the machine too for it to take effect. so you can use the shutdown command to do that in your batch file: shutdown.exe /f /r /t: 5 /c "DONT PANIC! Restarting for auto config settings to take effect." The other program I use to add the workstation to the ad domain is NETDOM.exe from microsoft. It can be downloaded as part of the windows xp support tools pack: WindowsXP-KB838079-SupportTools-ENU <-- that's what you're looking for. Use 7zip to extract the support.cab contents into a folder and you'll find netdom.exe in the list of files. Check its command line switches for usage. I'm sure all of this stuff can be done these days with power shell but I haven't had time to learn it yet. I have however seen it in action and it is EXTREMELY powerful for active directory manipulation in the right hands from a command prompt. Netdom requires that the workstation service is up and running before it will work correctly. This required me to run the sleep.exe program, also from Microsoft to pause the batch file for 15 seconds to ensure the workstation service was up and running before proceeding. Sleep can be downloaded as part of the windows resource kit tools pack rktools.exe its inside a cab file called Cabs.winrk.cab Netdom will also fail if the machine already has an existing account on the domain, so they must be deleted from their OU's before running netdom in a batch file. Look at wsname, netdom and sleep. This is all you need to rename the machine and add it to the domain automatically using 2x batch files in the startup folder (not runonce) and 1 or 2 reboots. Hope that helps. PS. Machine accounts sometimes take a while to appear in the ad users and computers browser. They don't all show up at once.

Sooooo either this is another product with the same name OR he discontinued it because they bought him out lol. I've tried using ghost solution suite 2.5 to run post deployment ghost tasks on the xp partition on some duel boot intel macs. Unfortunately ghost SS 2.5 has a nasty bug where it loads the WINPE ram drive and then throws up an error saying it cant find the windows installation folder. This is apparently due to the fact that windows is installed in partiton 3 on the drive and not partition 1. Other people have posted on the symantec forum describing the same problem, not on a mac but on a duel booting windows PC set up with XP and Vista. Symantec replied saying they couldn't replicate the problem and so there was no fix for it. That was about a month ago...........haven't been back to th forum since. Currently we use apple remote desktop to multicast a XP partition winclone file out to the macs or you can embed the winclone file inside your mac DMG image, deploy it via deploystudio multicast and then use ARD or DS to send a unix terminal command to all the clients to tell them to extract the file. Anyone else using winclone in this way?

Howdy ^^ This will not change the name but you could perhaps stop it from displaying it or change it to display something else using a freeware utility called 'deeper' to reconfigure the advanced hidden settings of the login window. It can be found on the apple.com website under 'all downloads' and then the disk / system utilties section. I'm pretty much a noob with these macs so I can't help you at the moment. Give me 6 months or so ^^ Deeper has helped me remove any accounts from being displayed at the login window (network, local and admin), and set a message for our end user agreement policy etc. It has lots of other features too. Handy little app.