Are GPO Group Policies somehow applicable for local users on one computer without active directory domain?

Question

Hi guys, I find it very useful that there are plently of settings available in the GPO, e.g. a possibility to disable S1-S3 standby modes for users and many other settings. But I don't have a domain controller. I have a local shared computer with maybe 4-5 users. From time to time a user will change (old user gets deleted, new user is created). At the latest at this point it will be annoying to configurate several local settings for the non-admin user, e.g. by registry or similar. Or if I realize that I want to change a setting for all local users, it will be painful to do this by hand. I would like to use the GPO in the admin account of the local machine to configurate all the settings, and if a new non-admin user is created, all of the default rules/settings, which I configurated via GPO, will automatically be applied to the new user, reducing the effort of doing several settings manually. So the result would be more or less like for a domain controlled GPO configuration but with the local admin account as source of rules... Basically my questions are:

• is there an easy way to achieve what I want?
• Can I maybe set the local admin account as "domain controller" and add all local non-admin users to this domain :-) so that all the GPO settings, which I configurate there, will just be rolled out to existing and newly created local non-admin users?
• Or can I maybe configurate all the GPO settings on the local admin account and save them like a template and then somehow roll those settings out to all other users somehow?

The thing is: I don't even know how to change some settings by hand on a local non-admin user... for example: I don't even know how to disable standby modes S1-S3 for a local user. I only know this setting from the GPO. Can someone help me? Any good and manageable ideas?

Answer 1

Hello PW, Thank you for posting in our Q&A forum.

Are GPO Group Policies somehow applicable for local users on one computer without active directory domain?

A: If it is a user configuration, and you configured this user setting via local group policy, each user that login to this machine will apply this user setting.

If it is a computer configuration, and you configured this computer setting via local group policy, no matter any user that login to this machine, this computer setting will apply to this machine.

for example: I don't even know how to disable standby modes S1-S3 for a local user.
A: Did you mean the policy "Allow standby states(S1-S3) when sleeping (Plugged in/ on battery)", if so, you can check this thread below you posted.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1203558/disabling-of-standby-states-(s1-s3)-has-no-effect

Hope the information above is helpful. If you have any question or concern, please feel free to let us know. Best Regards,
Daisy Zhou

Answer 2

In between I found out that disabling "Allow standby states(S1-S3) when sleeping (Plugged in/ on battery)" via GPO was working properly for all users. I only got confused because all users kept going into sleep mode after a while and the sleep option in the start menu did also not disappear. I had to realize that this the reason for this behavior is sleep mode S0, better known as modern standby and that it has nothing to do with S1-S3 sleep states... So basically my question was kinda stupid. I thought that the GPO does not affect the other users (as the users still went sleeping after disabling S1-S3). I will have to take a look on how I can disable all sleep modes (including modern standby) via GPO. I want only hibernate to be left.