Fleet of windows XP computers. This might be old news, but I was asked to get rid of all those built in windows games on the local machines.
The machines were all deployed with a factory default OEM image, so I didn’t have control as to what was in the images.
Windows has a built in control for dealing with removing components. This seems to work very well for getting rid of those built-in pesky games like free cell.
Microsoft has a little KB about it:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222444
Basically its the sysocmgr.exe application.
I created a script that I deployed to a single test computer via a gpo in startup that points to the variables that sysocmgr.exe needs: the path to sysocmgr.ini and the path to a simple txt file that has your component removal items.
My RemoveGames.txt looks like this:
[Components]
freecell = off
hearts = off
minesweeper = off
msnexplr = off
pinball = off
solitaire = off
spider = off
zonegames = off
and my script looks like this:
sysocmgr.exe /i:%windir%\inf\sysoc.inf /u:”\\blahblahblah\RemoveGames.txt”
hint: “\\blahblahblah” means any path you want that the local machine that is getting the script deployed to has access, can be sysvol or some other accessible share.
I’m going to give this a shot and see how it works!