Default User in Win7 for someone used to XP
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We don’t use AD Group Policies. We used System Policies with Windows XP, but now that we are moving to Windows 7, that doesn’t seem to work. (For whatever reason, the System Policy, that works fine on XP, doesn’t apply to Win7 machines.) So we’re left trying to get the Default User set up properly, the main issue being Folder Redirection.
So how does one make a Default User profile in Win7? Or do you even have to? Does it just get copied from the Administrator user? The FOG User Guide alludes to that, but I haven’t seen anything concrete.
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Hmmm… I thought I would have more bites. This seems like it would affect just about everyone. So there must be something about this somewhere. I’ve searched the forum for “Default User” and “DefaultUser” and come up empty. I did manage to confirm that Windows 7 [I]can[/I] create the DefaultUser profile from the Administrator user’s when using Sysprep. A setting has to be set in unattend.xml (which I’ve never used). Details are [URL=‘http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973289’]here[/URL].
Looks like I get to get my hands dirty with the new tools.
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if you are using Windows Server 2008 here is a resource that I found helpfull, and this has worked for me
best of luck.
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Thanks pbhound. We’re actually not using Windows Server 2008. We’re using Samba. So no Group Policies for us (at least until Samba 4 is released and stabilises). For Windows XP we were able to use Windows NT-style System Policies, which worked. However, I was beginning to lean away from them anyway. Local policies and registry hacking work and FOG makes it simple enough to deploy them to groups of machines.
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In my understanding the administrator profile gets setup and thats the “default user” in windows 7 so im pretty sure if you set everything there and sysprep it should pull through for all your user’s, i havent had any things not work for me yet but i must say i havent made any changes on the local machine with regards to policies, but you could try LOGON SCRIPTS which is what i do in my case which sets permissions for groups on all my machines once added to the domain
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Kirksec, I’m not sure of the default behaviour of Sysprep, but I know that you can set an option to copy the Administrator profile to the DefaultUser profile in unattend.xml. I’ve just confirmed that it works. (As I’m sure many others have before me.)
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RuralIT, thats exactly what i meant ( Probably didnt sound like it haha) … what ever is setup in the Admin profile gets copied to the Default user profile if its set in the xml
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RuralIT and Kirksec; actually the Admin profile is disabled by default. and the default user has i believe modified admin privileges. but either way you should be ok.
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Ok…this is what I heard…and I have not tested it, but you can try it out on a test machine. On windows 7, customize a profile exactly the way you want it. Then create a second administrator user on that machine. Then reboot, and login as the second user. Next step…go in to c:\users and delete the default user folder. Make a copy of the profile folder you have customized with your first user. Rename the copy you made to default user. Then everyone who logs in after that will get the customized settings you setup when they login.
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David, that process does work but I beleive the folder name is just Default and its a hidden folder as well. Also if you need to lock down some settings abit more you can always run “gpedit.msc” on each computer but this would be fairly time consuming. In Windows 7 you can also set up a network printer IP as a local printer and it will be available to all users on that computer (much easier than copying to default user profile the XP way).