[German]Today a topic for Windows administrators, which can cause trouble. It's about updating group policies in the background, a problem that a blog reader brought to my attention.
Advertising
A reader information
In mid-January 2020 blog reader Florian R. contacted me by mail (thanks for that). In a short text he wrote the following:
I have a topic for you which has plagued me for months with many customers.
Since one of the last Windows 10 releases a background update is active on group policies, about every 2h. Not under Windows 7.
This information was new to me personally. According to this forum post, foreground processing of Group Policy only occurs when the device boots up or the user logs in. Background processing is the thing that happens about every 90 minutes on Windows workstations, with GP updating itself regularly.
I'm not sure that 'only in the last Windows 10 releases', is really true. In this post someone describes how to disable this refresh using Group Policy. It states that the background refresh is available since Windows 2000. But I got a Feedback from a German reader confirming, that the behavior has changed since Windows 10.
Hints on how to adjust the refresh interval can be found for example in this technet wiki article.
There may be problems
Blog reader Florian R. pointed out in his e-mail that this different behaviour can lead to problems. He writes about it.
This is what happens when you are clumsy like me, for example:
- The Windows Explorer crashes on the PCs about every 2 hours
- Programs started on network drives crash approx. every 2h
The change with my customers became active in October 2019.
Reason: In the GPOs for drive mapping, I added "replace" instead of "update
This means that Windows 10 now interrupts the network drives with every refresh of the GPO
Florian R. writes in his mail: 'A setting that never caused problems under Windows XP/7' and comments: Maybe this will help others.
After publishing the German edition of this blog post yesterday, German blog reader Karl commented on twitter (here and here). Below is the translation of his German tweets.
Advertising
This has happened in the past sometimes, but is not by design. So the described problems for various reasons we always set CSE GPOs to replace + remove if no longer used. And these problems have not been solved so far. Newest build is still 1809 /1903.
If this problem occurs again it is a bug that he should report to Microsoft. https://msft.it/6015TZjMf
Nothing has changed in background processing, and I would see little need for optimization there.
So affected admins man grab that chance and report ist to Microsoft.
Advertising
