by Darren Mar-Elia | Apr 8, 2014 | Windows 8.1
Last week, Microsoft shipped to MSDN subscribers, the bits for the first update to Windows 8.1. Regular users of 8.1 will get the update starting today, through Windows Update. A natural question would be, did Microsoft make any outwardly visible improvements or...
by Darren Mar-Elia | Feb 21, 2014 | Group Policy Preferences, IE Policy, Windows 8, Windows 8.1
An astute reader of this blog brought an interesting scenario to my attention, and I spent some time confirming it. For those of you running Windows 8 (or 8.1) there’s a neat “feature” that allows your users to circumvent controls you put in place...
by Darren Mar-Elia | Oct 22, 2013 | Windows 8.1
A while back I wrote a post describing the new Group Policy caching feature in Windows 8.1. As I mentioned in the post, this feature was designed to speed up GP processing when “synchronous” foreground policy processing was occurring. Synchronous...
by Darren Mar-Elia | Jul 25, 2013 | Desired State Configuration, Group Policy, Group Policy Management, Server 2012, Windows 8.1
If you haven’t read my most recent post on Desired State Configuration (DSC)–the new feature coming with the Windows Management Framework v4 (i.e. PowerShell v4, which will ship in the box in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012-R2) then I encourage you to...
by Darren Mar-Elia | Jul 9, 2013 | Desired State Configuration, Windows 8.1
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about my first experiences with the new Desired State Configuration (DSC) feature that is part of Windows Server 2012-R2 and Windows 8.1 Preview (and will also be available for Windows 8/2012 and Windows 7/2008-R2). I got a chance to...
by Darren Mar-Elia | Jul 3, 2013 | Group Policy, Tips & Tricks, Windows 8.1
The other day I tweeted about an article posted on the Microsoft TechNet site, that gave a brief overview of the new Group Policy features coming in Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012, R2. One of the items mentioned in the article, albeit briefly, was a new...
