Saturday, July 25, 2009

Modify group policy to gain/restrict access rights for windows account

As I started to work, I loaned a laptop from company. It works fine and it is more advanced than my own, however, it is really annoying to find that certain functionality are restricted to access, although I gained the administrator role, those functions were disabled before they loaned it to me, one of which is that I cant access screen saver tab in desktop properties, while by default it is set to start every 5 mins and be password protected on resume, which is quite inconvenience for me as I dont want to input the long password every time I come back to my laptop.

Later I found that I can enabled the tab in group policy, so I tried. Type gpedit.msc from Run, and go to display directory as shown below:
(User Configuration-Administrative Templates-Control Panel-Display)


In the right panel, you can see a list of functionality you can configure, e.g, hide the screensaver tab, etc, by default, the state is "not configured", if you find that the state is same as default, this means that they control the setting from the registry, not thou group policy. In this case, we have to go to registry and delete/modify corresponding registries. Details are as followings:
Delete "ScreenSaverIsSecure" from:

HKEY-Current User\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Desktop HKEY-Local Machine\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Control Panel\Desktop

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