Sometimes I’ve been doing this Group Policy thing for so long, that I forget some of the things I’ve done in the past. Today, I got another reminder of this when someone asked how they could find out how long Group Policy processing was taking on a remote system. Of course, there are ways, especially in Windows 7 and beyond, that you can troll the Group Policy Operations Log in Event Viewer to determine this, but if you want to do it across multiple machines or do it remotely, in a quick way, I have a solution–one that I wrote something like 4 years ago!

That solution is called gptime.exe. It’s a command-line utility that is available on our GPOGUY.COM site. I just did a quick update to it (to version 1.1) to fix an issue connecting to remote Win 7 systems. This handy little utility will return how long GP processing took for the computer and any users that had logged onto that machine in the past. It also includes the time that GP processing last occurred for computer and user. You can see an example of the output with the screenshot shown above this posting. Pretty cool, and very easy to use. Just type:

gptime win7test

Where win7test is the name of the remote system I want to get processing times from. Note that you’ll need .Net 2.0 on the machine where this utility runs and, if you’re connecting to a Windows 7 system, you’ll need to ensure that the remote registry service is running for this to work (and you’ll also need permissions to read the HKLM registry hive on that remote system).

Enjoy!

Darren