Tag Archives: Registry

Computer Name appear under My Computer-XP only

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Reg File

Just double click the file and say yes to merge to reg. Adds the Computer Name to appear under My Computer.

Fails on Windows 7 because the part of the reg that is edited in Windows 7 needs admin rights and even the admin doesn’t have rights, so you have to manually edit it. Annoying!

You can run the .reg above or if you don’t trust it, then edit the reg manually as shown below

Change Computer Name Text
Go to regedit
First go to
Delete the entry in (Default)
Rename LocalizedString just in case. Create a new “Expandable String Value” and rename it LocalizedString
Put in it
My Computer %COMPUTERNAME%

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/839/mycomp1.png/

Then it appears you have to go to (although not all the time. Sometimes just the first above edit works)

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/62/mycomp2.png/

And remove the txt in (Default)
Create a new “Expandable String Value” and rename it LocalizedString and put
%COMPUTERNAME%
Close regedit and press F5 and should update, if not reboot, if still doesn’t work then check over the reg changes again.

You can try and edit the keys in Windows 7 or Server 2008 but you’ll need to take control of those specific keys in the permissions tab or you’ll get access denied and won’t even be able to give yourself permissions to change the permissions to that key.

EDIT-Just tried in Server 2008 R2 and appears it doesn’t know what the %COMPUTERNAME% tag is so just shows %COMPUTERNAME% oh well.

(I think I need to look at a site redesign as the small area means having problems adding images hence the external image links above)

Disable XP firewall using batch file

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Created this as was forever doing it on machine where it was decided not to roll it out over AD. So I did it on an individual bases. Annoying having to go to gpedit.msc all the time to set these settings. So created a batch file to put it directly into the registry, just when gpedit puts it.

Stick the following in a cmd window or in a batch file.

REG ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\DomainProfile /v EnableFirewall /t REG_DWORD /d 0
REG ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\WindowsFirewall\StandardProfile /v EnableFirewall /t REG_DWORD /d 0

What it’s doing:

REG ADD = Adds an entry to the registry.
/v is the Value name that appears under the selected key (In the above example it’s EnableFirewall. This will appear under DomainProfile and StandardProfile as in the image)

Firewall

/t is the RegKey type in this case it’s a DWORD so you put REG_DWORD

/d is the data you want in it. In this case we want it set to 0. Because it’s set to 0 this bit isn’t actually needed. As adding EnableFirewall as a DWORD it appears to automatically default it to no value, 0. I just included it in the batch file so I knew what the batch file was doing.

And that’s it. Disadvantage I’ve found using the batch file instead of gpedit.msc is that after you run it, it won’t take effect until you reboot. Also if you then check gpedit, it will just said Not Configured. If you then want to use gpedit to config it. You have to set the gpedit entry to disabled, maybe doing gpupdate /force (you can get away with not having to do that most times) and then set it back to Not Configured. Then it will remove the reg entries.

Other than that, appears to work fine.

Info on the REG command can be found here. This helped me create the batch.

http://www.petri.co.il/reg_command_in_windows_xp.htm