Jim Guckin

Since I for some reason thought that Monday was Wednesday, it only seems right for me to post Q&A Monday on Wednesday:

Question:

Hi

I am currently running Windows 2003 on my servers.  I have two DC’s in my environment.  Clients are running Windows XP.  I have 5 OUs created for the varying users in the different departments in my organisation.

I created a GPO, going through AD – > Selecting the OU -> Add new GPO -> Called it screen saver

Enabled the Hide Screen Saver tab, Enabled Screen Saver, Password protect the screen saver and screen saver timeout 900 seconds.  Performed the gpupdate command on the DC.  However I left the system idle for 15 minutes and the system did not lock and the screen saver tab is still available.  Am I missing a step.  What is required for this to be activated.

Anwser:

This sounds like a mistake that I have made many times when I first started messing with Group Policy.  I would check to make sure that your users are in the OU that the Group Policy Object is tied to.  If they aren’t then your policy wont stick unless it’s the defualt domain policy.  Once you confirm that, on the workstations run “gpupdate/force” (without the quotes) and that will force the XP workstations to look to the domain controller for the updated settings.  Let me know if that helped you.

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If  you have any questions that you want Jim to answer, from business servers to home computers, drop him a line at me@jimguckin.com, and he’ll try to answer your question.  Check back every Monday for a new Question and Answer session, and check back Wednesday and Friday for other technical insights.