Introduction to Configuration and Management

The Administrative Templates extension of Group Policy saves information in the Group Policy template in Registry.pol files. These files contain the customized registry settings that you specify (by using the Group Policy snap-in) to be applied to the Machine (HKLM) or User (HKCU) portion of the registry. The Windows 2000 Registry.pol file is analogous to the Windows 95 or Windows 98 Config.pol file and the Windows NT 4.0 NTConfig.pol file.

Note

The format of the .pol files in the Group Policy template differs from that of previous versions of Windows NT and Windows 95 operating systems.

Two Registry.pol files are created and stored in the Group Policy template, one for Computer Configuration , which is stored in the \Machine subdirectory, and one for User Configuration , which is stored in the \User subdirectory.

The .pol files that are created by Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95 can be applied only to the operating system on which they were created. The .pol file produced by the Windows NT 4.0 System Policy Editor is a binary file, whereas the Registry.pol file produced by Administrative Templates node of the Group Policy snap-in is a text file with embedded binary strings.

To view the effect of a Registry.pol file on a Windows 2000 Professional workstation, use Gpresult.exe /s or Gpresult.exe /v after the Registry.pol file is applied.

For more information about Registry.pol files, see the Microsoft Platform SDK link the Web Resources page at https://windows.microsoft.com/windows2000/reskit/webresources .