windows 10 local users and groups missing

The “Members” option was really good at cleaning up those rogue members of the local admin group but its was also really hard to setup as you had to have a new group policy every time you wanted a different list of members in local group on a computer.

The “Members” option removes any groups or users that are not explicitly specified and the “Members Of” option just adds a specific group which out removing any existing groups. This option had two modes one called “Members” option which I also call the “Iron Fist” mode and the other “Members Of” option which is much gentler. So how do you give a users full admin access to a computer but stop them from adding more people to the local admin group on a computer? Use Group Policy Preference of course.īut first a bit of History… Since Group Polices were first introduced with Windows 2000 there was an setting called “Restricted Groups” which allows you to control the membership of a group. Once solution to this is of course following Microsoft best practice and not give your users local admin access to their PC or Server and in an utopian environment this would be possible but we all live in the real world where managers have admin access to their PC’s and developers are allowed to install any software they want. When this does happen it is also its almost impossible to discover as you have to run a query every computer to see who is in the local admin group and then figure out which account should be a member.

The problem is that when you give someone local admin access to a computer (because they legitimately need it) you cant stop them from giving admin access to someone else on the same computer. One problem I see all the time is IT administrator never being able to control who is a local administrator of any particular computer.

Windows 10 local users and groups missing