Our company has many virtual Windows 7 instances. Based on recommendations from VMWare, we want to customize the visual effects to optimize performance. We have found that we can change the following options via GPO:
- Let Windows choose what's best for my computer
- Adjust for best appearance
- Adjust for best performance
- Custom
VMWare wants us to select Custom and then apply very specific options in the check boxes below the four options above. I've found an article to do this via the registry manually but those options do not work. GPO also does not handle this natively. Does anyone know how we can change these options to what we need via GPO?
Best Answer
First off, have a look at this page, which is a little blog post on performance tuning Windows 7 for virtualization. Seems like it might be helpful.
Second, the only Microsoft-supported way to do what you want is via a user profile customization, process documented in a Microsoft KB here.
Third, as suggested by @Zordache , setting registry keys is a function that's natively handled by GPPs (Group Policy Preferences), which is probably a better approach to this than GPOs.
Finally, if you insist on doing so via a GPO, your best option is probably going to be to use a logon or startup script that sets the registry keys in question. For the most part, they're the same as the key values in XP, but you should be able to do your own Googling to get precise key values for the precise options you want to set.
I suppose that in case the link goes dead, I'll post the registry keys and values for the majority of the settings below. Grabbed from the third link there.