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[argimiro Profile]

I found I could control many aspects of my windows xp computer via 'Group Policy', but on digging, it seems it's a kind of tool intended for fairly involved network environments??

I'm just a home user with a single machine running xp pro sp2.

I'm building an unattended xp install dvd with drivers and apps, and would like to somehow pre-setup the 'group policy'.. at the moment I'm using a very long winded vbscript via a batch script to literally click my way right through gpedit.msc on setup - is it possible i can use 'secedit' and 'gpupdate' to restore a backup file of some sort?

so, for instance, I could set up group policy / local computer policy once, manually, on the development machine - then save it to file and restore it on another machine automatically straight after xp installs?

"or something".. pretty wooly on my whole thinking on this one really

Could I just copy the entire %SystemRoot%\System32\GroupPolicy\ folder over and then run gpupdate maybe? or is there lots of stuff in there that's completely unique to a given machine..

Or maybe just the registry.pol files?
%SystemRoot%\System32\ GroupPolicy\Machine\registry.pol
%SystemRoot%\System32\ GroupPolicy\User\registry.pol

[edit]
ok i tried these 2 batch files & they seemed to have the desired effect, running on a single machine.. the changes got reflected in gpedit.msc okay.

backup:

Code: Select all

@echo off
cls
echo Backing up 'Computer Configuration' of Local Computer Policy
copy %SystemRoot%\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine\registry.pol Mregistry.pol /y
echo Backing up 'User Configuration' of Local Computer Policy
copy %SystemRoot%\System32\GroupPolicy\User\registry.pol Uregistry.pol /y
pause


restore:

Code: Select all

@echo off
cls
echo Restoring 'Computer Configuration' of Local Computer Policy
copy Mregistry.pol %SystemRoot%\System32\GroupPolicy\Machine\registry.pol /y
echo Restoring 'User Configuration' of Local Computer Policy
copy Uregistry.pol %SystemRoot%\System32\GroupPolicy\User\registry.pol /y
echo Refreshing entire Local Computer Policy
gpupdate /force
pause


i then took the 2 'backed up' registry.pol files and 'restored' them on a completely different machine.. again all the settings came up perfectly as expected, in gpedit.msc

BUT.. is there something i'm not seeing here that means transferring these files from machine to machine like this is a really bad idea.. or is it fine & okay?