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Set the IE homepage via the registry

Friday, July 11th, 2008 | Tech Help

We just got in a batch of HP desktops and so far they look to be a good investment. There isn’t much crap/bloat ware installed on it, so we can get them out the door to our users quite quickly. We have had only 1 minor issue with them. For each new user who logs in, the system sets the IE homepage to an HP/AOL site, not our corporate intranet. Instead of emailing our users instructing them on how to set the homepage back to our intranet site I logged into our Desktop Authority server and added a new option under the registry settings.

They registry key to use is:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main]
“Start Page”=”http://www.howtogeek.com/”

Here is a screen cap of the DA settings I used:

After replicating this to our domain controllers each user who logs in will have their homepage set to http://sharepoint/.

NOTE: The above procedure was used because my GPO for setting the default homepage was not working on these HP desktops.

Tags: Desktop Authority, registry, windows