Power Policy via GPO

[Dave]

In our environment, we have hundreds of laptops where are our users do not
have local administrative priviliages. I'd like to create a GPO that will
configure their laptops so they go into hibernate after 30 minutes. I'd also
like to make sure they cannot change this once the policy has been set.
Anyone have any success at doing something like this?

Thanks!

 

[Tim Meddick]

I'm pretty sure this is NOT possible. Not that I know that much about Group
POlicies but the shutdown function (which could be invoked via GPO by using
a start-up script with the line "shutdown /s /t xx" where xx is the number
of seconds to wait (in your case 1800) and /s is for shutdown or /r for
reboot or /l for logoff). This does not involve an option for sending the
computer into hibernation, only reboot, logoff and shutdown. Hibernation
can be linked to idle time only. Hope this is of some use.

Yours, Tim Meddick, Peckham

 

[Dave]

Thanks for the info. I'm actually looking for the laptop to go in
hibernation after 30 minutes of inactivity. Guess I left that detail out.

I've gotten to work via GPO when an admin logs in, but when a regular user
logs in, the setting doesn't apply.

Thanks.

 

[Tim Meddick]

I've just come across this command using Rundll32 :-

RUNDLL32.EXE PowrProf.dll,SetSuspendState

Which should place the computer into hibernation, you could set it to run
using some scheduling such as the "at" command (but that would be at a
certain time) or, and I haven't tried this yet, you could type it in the
"screensave.exe" value under "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop" with
Regedit and set "ScreenSaveTimeOut" to 1800 (seconds). Some other programs
can be used instead of a genuine screensaver such as explorer (although I
don't know why you would try) so it is possible that it would be the answer.

As I said, I really don't know allot about Group Policies, I wanted to set
some limitations across four computers to disable to ability to change the
homepage (as users were constantly changing them from our company's homepage
to gaming sites) in IE. The Policy editor only seems to allow you to change
user settings for the current user and, as that has to be Admin to even use
Policy editor, that baffles me. Eventually I found the reg key to disable
the option and went round importing the setting. This involved opening
Regedit in Admin and going to HKEY_USERS , finding the right user and
changing the value! There must be a way of setting the options in Group
Policy Editor and then exporting them so you can apply them to each user. I
will try to find out.

Yours,