Tool: OSConfig Default User Customizations

A great feature about OSConfig is the ability to apply a Registy Setting to the Default User’s profile. I’ll explain how this works in this post.

For example there is a Registry Setting that enables Start Tiles to have a “Run as a different user” option. This is essential if you are a user that is not an Administrator, but have a separate account that you Run As that has Administrator rights. To enable this feature you need to add a registry entry for the Current User (logged in) for it to function.

So we want to make this registry entry default for all users that log in. To do this we simply use the Reg file in the image above (which is included in the Samples).

Now what happens when OSConfig imports this Reg file is that it will look to see if HKEY_CURRENT_USER is part of the Reg file. If it is, then it will make a copy of this Reg file and create a new Reg file that will import to the Mounted Administrator Hive, and the mounted Default User Hive. This way any configuration you need to make for Default User, just make a Reg file for HKEY_CURRENT_USER and OSConfig will handle the rest.

You can find this Reg file in C:\Windows\OSConfig\Settings\Default User after OSConfig has completed. In this case the Default User Hive was mounted to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\DefaultUser. It is this functionality that removes the need for CopyProfile in the Sysprep Unattend.xml