One of the difficult aspects of moving away from users having administrative rights on their local machines is the knotty problem of printer driver installation. Typically, limited or standard users can’t install printer drivers, only administrators can. The same is true of a wide range of other device types. In Windows Server 2008, you can delegate the ability for members of the Users group to install devices of a particular setup class. Once again, you’ll need the GUID for the setup class of interest.
One caveat is that this policy only works for signed device drivers. Unsigned drivers will still generally need to be installed by administrators.
Hybrid Hard Disk
The hybrid hard disk (HHD) is a new device type being co-developed by Microsoft and Samsung (and others too, although it’s not clear how broadly the policy settings will apply to other designs, such as Intel’s). The idea is to combine a traditional magnetic spinning-disk device with non-volatile semiconductor storage (flash memory). It’s a “hybrid” because it slots somewhere between spinning disks (cheap and ubiquitous) and pure solid-state disks (expensive and rare).
The Group Policy settings give you the ability to turn the non-volatile (NV) cache off entirely. You can also selectively turn off the feature, whereby the disk writes boot-and-resume data to the NV cache during shutdown or hibernate, for faster boot or resume. Additionally, you can turn off the feature whereby the disk goes into a power-saving mode by spinning down the magnetic disk and meeting I/O requests from the NV cache. Finally, you can disable the feature that stores registry writes in the NV cache (“solid-state mode”).
Generally, the default settings (that is, Group Policy settings “not configured”) give the best speed. Organizations moving to HHDs may wish to start deploying them while using Group Policy to restrict the feature set until full testing of all features is complete.
Recent blog posts…
Power Management – You now have the power to manage power
Device Installation Control – Defining a “Driver Store”
New Group Policy Settings in WS2008 – A powerful toolset
Multi-Language Support & Multiple Local GPO’s
