W2K User Settings

[guidos]

Does anyone have any idea if there is a way to have every user have identical settings (like the screen saver, among other things) when they log in to a W2K machine? I thought there might be a registry hack or hacks out there to accomplish this, but I can't find any info about it anywhere. Maybe it's just not possible?

Thanks in advance for any and all replies.

 

[wolluf]

As win2k is designed to keep individual user settings...

Are you talking standalone machine? - On domain you can more easily control 'workstation' environment.

One obvious option - make all users log on with same user id.

Perhaps you could explain the background to the requirement - you may get better advice then.

 

[bgauntt]

Or you can build one PC to be exactly how you want the others to look and then ghost an image of that PC and use the ghosted image to load onto any other PC's and the only thing you might have to change is the IP address if you are setting up as static address.

 

[guidos]

What we have here is a W2K networked PC, both to Novell and NT. The users are all being forced (by new security policies) to log into the domain as opposed to the workstation. For some reason, my boss asked me to figure out how to give the same settings to every user that logs in. We know how to give everyone the same desktop, start menu programs, etc., but can't figure a way to give all users the same screensaver, power settings, etc. There are no policies in effect on the domain as far as I'm aware, and I'm not sure what the ultimate plan is as far as that goes. I did copy (on my PC) the Current User's Desktop settings to the Default User's Desktop in the registry, but that didn't seem to make any difference.

 

[wolluf]

If you use roaming profiles, you can make everybody load the same mandatory profile (just create suitable profile, save it on server (use copy to feature from system properties/profiles), reneame the ntuser.dat file as ntuser.man and point all the users to use this as their profile) - they can alter this while logged on but changes will be discarded at logoff. You could add the use of policies to stop changes while logged on as well - but from experience I'd caution about tying users down too much (eg, start having to find ways to let specific users do things).