Archive for the ‘Windows Vista’ Category
The One Reason You Should Use Group Policy Preferences
The job of deploying printers and setting default printers has been quite simply a pain in the butt. Well automating the default printer has been anyway. Now if you are like me and work in an educational environment where there are computer labs, left right and center, libraries, staff notebooks (separated on different campuses), student notebooks etc etc and users all wanting to print to specific printers and of course people not wanting to select the correct one from a list of printers then read on.
Use Group Policy Preferences !!!
In the past I have used the Print Management Console to deploy the printers via Group Policy, now that did work very well, but there was still the “overlooked” problem of being able to set the default printer. To get around this what I used to do was to name the computers in a certain way and then have a vbs script that would get the name of the printer and then set the default based on the computer name.
I was reading an article by GPO Guru Derek Melber about the new Group Policy Preferences that come with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista and thought I would explore this option.
To start off your client will need the Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions both XP and Vista Clients need these. Now you can manually download these and install via a computer startup script via Group Policy or if you have a WSUS Server then you can make this “Feature Pack” available via Windows Updates (this is the option I took, less work!).
Now that you have the Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions installed on the clients, you can go ahead and play with the GPO’s. If you open up the Group Policy Management snap in and edit a GPO object you will see “Preferences”
Use SyncToy as a Backup Option
I was scrolling through my RSS Feeds this morning and saw a great article from the Technet Magazine. It is a “Utility Spotlight” article on SyncToy. Working in an education environment where students and staff for that matter are always coming to out office to get their computers re imaged or fixed for some other reason and when you ask them have they got a backup of their documents the standard response is “NO, Can’t you do that for me?”.
After having a play around with SyncToy I have found that this could be a cool little utility for alot of my users. It is a simple, easy to setup and install peice of software that will work on either XP or Vista. It works by having “Folder Pairs”, a Left Folder and a Right Folder. You can setup different Folder Pairs as well. For example I might want to create a folder pair for just my Photo’s and copy them to a specific network location, then I might have another folder pair for my documents and so on.
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Add a Custom Script to a Vista Syspreped Image
Have you ever been in charge of creating and syspreping a Vista Image and needed to have the abiltiy to manually enter a computer name rather than have sysprep randomly generate one?
Well this is the situation I am in at the moment, getting a new Notebook Image, Toshiba M750 Tablet, ready for deployment to about 150 students next year.
In the old days of an XP sysprep you could just leave the computer name blank in the sysprep file and as part of sysprep it would prompt you for the name of the computer. But in Vista there is a bug that if you leave the computer name out sysprep will NOT prompt you for one, and what is worse is that when you try and log in you get this error “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed”. The work around for this is to use an asterix for the computer name. It will still generate a random name but at least you can login (this may have been fixed in SP1 though, I have not tested it yet). This is still no good for me.
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