[teq7]

Can you enable soundcards in a group policy? If not is there a way it can be done remotely without logging on to each computer locally? Thanks

[chuckhole]

There are so many possibilities here that my first inclination is to say no. First of all, the sound cards have to be enable within the BIOS. Second, the drivers have to be installed on the machine. In order to accomplish both, you have to touch the machine or have computers that are compliant with remote management such as OpenManage. Many of the business class machines are fully compliant but the home model machines are not. With OpenManage software, you can remotely update BIOS and drivers on PC's.

Secondly, to introduce Group Policy into mix is limited. You can disable sound cards using Group Policy by setting Deny Permissions on the basic drivers on the PC's. We accomplish a similar scenario by disabling the use of USB removable storage devices by denying the use of the USBSTOR.SYS, USBSTOR.PNF and USBSTOR.INF files.

Group Policy is meant to control software via Machine and User based policies. You can install software with Group Policy if the installation is condusive to a standard Windows instalation with MSI files. You may have to use an MSI Editor such as ORCA to customize the behavior of the installation.

If the Sound Card software saves its settings to the registry, then you record the various settings and create a custom Group Policy Template file (*.ADM) to control the settings of the software. Creating these templates from scratch is difficult if you do not know the correct syntax. I would suggest a Template editor to help with this. Look for the current template files installed with Active Directory. Open these with a text editor to see how they are created. Some good ones to look for are the SYSTEM.ADM and INETRES.ADM files. These are built for controlling the PC and Internet Explorer.