Category Archives: Group Policy

Something went wrong, OOBE

Just a really short post on an issue I saw a little while back which I’ve been meaning to get round to documenting.

Whilst working on VM optimization project, I booted up one of my VMs for testing and received the above message during the OOBE stage. The reason for this is because I disabled one of the scheduled tasks which I thought looked fairly innocuous, CloudExperienceHost. Turns out this is important to leave enabled, even if you don’t want your VMs connecting to the cloud as the Out of Box Experience uses it. Specifically, the task can be found under:

Microsoft\Windows\CloudExperienceHost\CreateObjectTask

Resolution : Enable task

I appreciate there are probably other reasons for this error message but this was what the issue was for me.

Disable WiFi Group Policy

I recently had a request by a customer to disable WiFi on their laptops. I know, crazy, right? They had their reasons though and it was a temporary solution to a problem.  The issue with disabling Wifi is that there isn’t actually a group policy which directly allows ‘disable wifi’ but the workaround is pretty easy. Essentially we need to disable the WlanSvc service.

What we need is to harness group policy preferences, so without further ado here goes:

  1. Create a new GPO. Browse to Preferences | Control Panel Settings | Services. Right click in the right-hand pane and select New | Service. Call it WlanSvc.
  2. In the properties, change Startup to Disabled
  3. Ensure the service name is WlanSvc. Note, you’ll probably not be able to find this service if you browse via the ellipses unless the machine you’re using for administering group policy is a laptop. This is why it’s important you name the service correctly.
  4. Under Service Action change to Stop Service.

 

5. Apply the group policy. Note, you will probably need to reboot the machine for everything to take effect properly. You may notice a short pause before full (wired) network connectivity kicks in, maybe about 20 seconds. After this you should see that wireless is disabled.