I came across a situation last week where I needed to finally disable NetBIOS over TCP/IP. While looking for a way to disable it, unfortunately, I found that there really isn’t a good clean way to do so using Group Policy. At least, if there was a good way, I couldn’t find it.

I’ve generated a couple time lapse videos in the past and I wanted to share my process with my readers.

In my organization we push out Adobe Reader using an Active Directory policy. In order to do this using we use the Software Management features of Active Directory which requires an .MSI. Adobe supplies an .MSI for Adobe Reader and it’s relatively simple to deploy as long as it’s a base version (ie. no updates). However, If you have to apply the quarterly updates the process becomes a little less intuitive. It is my hope that contributing this information and the script below will make the process a little easier for people to keep their Adobe Reader patched.

SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a technology incorporated into most hard drives that monitors the health the drive. Using SMART, the drive will log read/write failures. If the number of failures reach a certain threshold the drive can communicate that back to the BIOS or operating system and alert the user that the drive is failing. It’s then up to the user to replace the drive before the loss of data.

These are the possible Group Policy settings when configuring Automatic Updates as described in the “Group Policy Management” application. I needed them all in one place in order to discuss the settings with people in my organization.