You are the desktop administrator for your company’s sales department. The IT manager for the sales department needs to distribute three custom applications to the department’s Windows XP Professional computers. She deploys these applications by using Group Policy. Some users report that they must log on several times before the newly deployed applications are present on their computers. You need to ensure that all software is deployed the next time the users log on. What should you do?
A.
Enable the Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon policy.
B.
Enable the Always use classic logon policy.
C.
Enable the Turn off background refresh of Group Policy policy.
D.
Enable the Group Policy slow link detection policy.
Explanation:
By default Windows XP clients, contrary to Windows 2000 clients, use Fast Logon Optimization. This results in the asynchronous application of policy when the computer starts up and when the user logs on. This makes the logon process faster, but some GPOs might not be applied. To ensure that all GPOs are applied we should enable the Always wait for the network at computer startup and logon policy. This would force the Windows XP clients to process the GPOs synchronously which guarantee that they are all applied.
In this scenario this would ensure that the all published software would be deployed next time the users log on.
Incorrect Answers:
B: The Always use classic logon policy only override the default simple logon screen and uses the logon screen from previous versions of Windows. It would not affect the processing of GPOs.
C: The Background Refresh of Group Policy determines how often the GPOs are refreshed. If we enable the Turn off background refresh of Group Policy no GPOs would be refreshed. This would not address the current problem.
D: The Group Policy slow link detection policy defines a slow connection for purposes of applying and updating Group Policy. There is no indication that any slow WAN links are used in this scenario however.
MSDN, Platform SDK: Policies and Profiles, Logon Optimization
Microsoft Windows XP Professional Administrator’s Pocket Consultant, Chapter 8, Working with Logon and Startup Policies
MSDN, Platform SDK: Policies and Profiles, Background Refresh of Group Policy
Windows 2000 Server documentation, Policy for Group Policy: User configuration