IntelliAdmin.com - Windows Administration tricks and tips: 2006-04-30

I have been asked this a few times now. How can you force Microsoft Internet Explorer to default to a custom home page?

It really is a simple group policy setting, but with many group policy options - it is not always easy to find.

First, for this to work I am assuming you have a Windows 2003/2000 network with Active Directory, and your client workstations are joined to the domain

Get on the domain controller, go to Administrative Tools, and Launch Active Directory Users and Computers.

Right click on the domain where you would like to create the policy.

A menu will popup - select properties. A dialog box will be displayed.

Click on the Tab that says "Group Policy"

Now Click on the Edit Button

A tree view of policies will be displayed.

Drill down to this key:

User Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Internet Explorer Maintenance -> URLS

Now, double click on Important URLS. You should see a dialog box that lets you change the default Help, Home, and Search pages of IE.

Make your change, and wait. I will take some time before the change replicates across the network - workstations will also need to be rebooted for the change to take effect.

Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Check out our administration tools for windows

Citrix, and Microsoft Terminal services have had an annoyance for quite some time now. Numlock and Capslock just don't default to what you want.

It seems that if the user is not an administrator - both are cleared at login. No matter what registry hacks you try, the user is still stuck with these settings.

Finally I found a simple solution the the problem. It is an easy VB script that you call when the user logs in:

To turn Numlock on:
set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.SendKeys "{NUMLOCK}"

To turn capslock on:
set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.SendKeys "{CAPSLOCK}"

Uh. Yea...I didn't think you would even care about scroll-lock, so we wont spend another minute thinking about that waste of keyboard space.

Posted By: Steve Wiseman on Monday, May 01, 2006

Check out our administration tools for windows

Force IE to default to your home page

Numlock and Capslock - The enemy of Citrix and terminal services