Ask the Expert

How do I set the Web page default on a network of computers without setting them all individually?

I administer a network of 300 computers for a state school. We received a directive that all computers should have the D.O.E. Web page as their default page. I set the group policy in Server 2003 to the D.O.E. page, but the Dell default page still comes up on all my client units. Short of going into each registry one by one, is there another way to default each computer to one Web page?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    Login

A group policy should have done the trick. You may want to investigate why the group policy did not make the change as your computers may not be receiving other group policy updates as well.

To address your question, there's a range of potential solutions. The easiest way to ensure this occurs is to establish the group policy for user logins. You can either have the registry change load during the windows login procedure or set up a group policy for users to have a default Web site.

I've included a .reg file setting that would set the default start page for Internet Explorer and the location for Firefox. You can load this into a vbs script upon login for all users. This would ensure that even if the user changes the setting, it would get reset at each login.

For Internet Explorer:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwareMicrosoftInternet ExplorerMain] "Start Page"=http://searchnetworking.com"

For Firefox:
user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/"); gets inserted into the pref.js file in the profile folder.

This was first published in December 2009

Join the conversationComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.
    Back to top