How to apply settings to all users?

XP-Office 2000-various power settings

We use a Compaq Evo d300v pc with our projecter which multiple persons (up to 300 users) can use for presentations. I set up the pc with Windows XP Pro, Office 2000 (users preference), IE 6, and other software.

MY QUESTION IS: how to pass on settings from the user who set up the pc (me) to all future users of the pc. We don't want to use Active Directory or Group Policies. When people come to use the projecter, their initial login brings up Office installer prompts and any tweaks I made when I was logged on, have to be made again... i.e. power settings for monitor, hard drive, NIC, IE home page site address, etc.... HAS ANYONE DONE THIS?



When I logged on initially, I set the Administrator account up and give it a password. I set up certain users as Administrators and the rest of our domain users as power users. I logged on as myself, I am an administrator, and install Office 2000 and various other apps we use here. I've downloaded/installed all critical updates/patches for XP & Office. I adjusted the power settings and various other little tweaks (i.e. eliminate screen saver, modified the registry to retain the NUMLOCK setting on a user basis, chgd taskbar & start menu bar settings, etc.)

 

If it's XP-pro, you can do most of what you want using the local 'group policy' manager. start~run~gpedit.msc

The main difference in this and the domain style group policies is that these are specific to the local PC.

But other than that, you are pretty well stuck setting each user account like you want it. There are a few settings that are PC (global for all users) rather than User but not many.

If it's XP-home, I have no ideas at all.

 

Editing Registry for Other Users

 

Thanks for the Posts!

I've got some experimenting to do and reading too (about Group Policies). If there are any excellent sites or reference books about Group Policy that you all would recommend, please mention them.

I'll get back here with results once I've tinkered around.

 

leeleeleelee - thank you for that info on tweaking the reg for a specific other user. I wasn't aware it could be done. Useful stuff to know.

march16 - very little changed with group policy from 2K to XP. XP has some extra stuff and you mess with the policys a little differently but if it can be done in 2K, it will work in XP.

This book has the name of an excellent author on it and I would tend to trust anything he (Mark Minasi) has written or helped with.

Same book, dollar cheaper, site I don't know, lots of reviews.

This one has is XP-specific with less detail on policies (although it does have quite a bit) but has loads of other info you didn't even know you needed to know.

 

XP-Office 2000-various power settings

Thanks Newt for the literature to read!

I had really wanted to avoid using/considering Group Policies but if this is the only way to go, then that's where I've got to go. I'm a bit afraid since I know nothing about it.

In order to use Group Policies won't we have to make some changes on our servers? We're moving from our servers NT 4.0 to 2003. Using Group Policies is less pc by pc but more pushing from servers?

Well, I've got a bunch of questions so I've purchased the two books you recommended in your post and hope to learn a lot more about Group Policies.

Thanks again Newt!

 

Getting started with them may be a little tough. Steep learning curve. But once you see what can be done and how to go about it, should be a very worthwhile investment in your time.

If you are moving to 2003 (and AD probably) even more so than if you were staying with classic NT4 domains.