Hello AskPerf! Harshad Joshi here from the Performance team. Today we are going to talk about changing the “Region and Language” settings for all users at once. Typically, you change these settings on a per user basis. Well, we had a customer call in asking how they could change these settings for all users/computers on their domain. After a little digging, we walked him through the following actions of using Group Policy Preferences to push out the required settings to these machines:
For this example, we will use the “ English (Canada)” format, and link this policy to all computers in the domain.
Prerequisite
To use Group Policy Preferences (GPP), a Domain controller running Windows Server 2008 or windows Server 2008 R2 OS is required. For Windows 2003 Servers, you can use the GPP Client Side Extensions per KB943729 .
Steps Overview
1. Launch Group Policy Management Console (gmpc.msc)
2. Right click Default Domain Policy and select Edit to open Group Policy Management Editor
3. In Group Policy Management Editor, navigate to Computer Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Registry:
4. Right Click on Registry > New > Collection Item
5. Give your collection a name
6. Right Click on this Registry Item > New > Registry Wizard
7. Select Local Computer and click Next
8. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Control Panel > International
9. Select the below registry items under this registry key:
- Locale
- LocaleName
- sCountry
- sLanguage
- sLongDate
- iCountry
- iDate
- iMeasure
- iNeggCurr
You’ll see something similar to the following:
Link this to the Default Domain Policy. Your computers will receive these changes the next time they update their policies.
Additional Resources
- Group Policy Preferences Overview white paper
- Group Policy Preferences Getting Started Guide
- Information about new Group Policy preferences in Windows Server 2008
- Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions for Windows Server 2003 (KB943729)
-Harshad Joshi
Microsoft
