Yep, that’s right… you’ve got two years of support left on Windows XP SP3. Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP SP3 on April 8, 2014. Now that it is looking more and more like Windows 8 will be released this year, now is the time to encourage your organization to start upgrading and/or start looking at legacy applications that are not supported in new OS’es.
I saw an article over on Group Policy Central a few weeks back on a new Group Policy setting in Windows 8 and I finally got around to playing with the new setting tonight. The new setting is “Prohibit connection to non-domain networks when connected to domain authenticated network. In the Windows 8 GPMC, the policy is located in Computer Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Network > Windows Connection Manager > Prohibit connection to non-domain networks when connected to domain authenticated network.
Sorry for the lack of posts recently… I took a week long vacation and then got to tag along with my wife to a conference (another week of vacation while she worked!) and I’ve been catching up ever since. I’ve got a bunch of drafts that should be ready to post soon.
On the Windows 8 front, I’ve been playing around with Windows 8 like pretty much everyone else in the IT community. Every time I boot up a copy, I find something I haven’t noticed before. While loading Windows 8 Server into VM, I noticed a symbol that looked like a fermata at the end of the password field when I started typing in a password. Well, of course, my first inclination is, “what the heck is that?” And, of course, I just kept going. I noticed it again when the login screen came up and decided to click on it. It looks like the fermata is actually supposed to be an eye… clicking on it revealed my password. Cool! I think… Continue reading…
By default, an installation of Java will check for updates and then will prompt the end user to install the update whether or not the user has Admin rights. In a small environment, this may not be a problem, but in a larger environment, this can generate a lot of unnecessary support requests. If you’ve installed 32-bit/x86 Java on your 64-bit/x64 Operating System, the normal method of disabling Java updates with Group Policy isn’t going to work. You’ll need to add a Registry key in the Wow6432Node area of HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. Here’s how to do that so that your end users don’t see messages like this:
By default, an installation of Java will check for updates and then will prompt the end user to install the update whether or not the user has Admin rights. In a small environment, this may not be a problem, but in a larger environment, this can generate a lot of unnecessary support requests. Here’s how to disable the Java update checks so that your end users don’t see messages like this:
If you’re running Active Directory (AD) and want to use OpenDNS, you would think that you just need to update your DHCP server to give out their DNS servers, right? Wrong! Clients in an Active Directory need to point to AD DNS servers. Pointing the clients to third-party DNS can cause problems connecting to AD, Group Policy problems, and a number of other issues. Continue reading…
