Explained: What Does Applying Computer Settings… mean
You know how whenever you login to your Windows box you always see a message saying “Applying computer settings…” and it can sit there for what feels like forever!!! Well it annoyed me to no end, I wanted to find out what it really meant and see if there was a way to tell me what sort of voodoo Microsoft was running on my machine. So after a quick search I found 2 Microsoft KB articles, kb325376 and kb316243. Now, I have a meaningful description like applying group policy, playing log off sound, etc…
After running the following registry script on my machine, I can get a verbose output.
There are two ways to set this in the registry, Option 1
- Open the registry by clicking start, run, typing regedit.exe then clicking ok.
- Navigate to the following subkey
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system
- Right click to create a new "DWORD Value"
- Title the new DWORD key VerboseStatus
- Double click VerboseStatus and make sure it has a "Value data" of 1
- Close the registry, you’re done.
When you done, you should see your registry key look like the following image on your left.
Option 2 to create this setting is by copying and pasting the following code into a registry file called VerboseOutput.reg.
1 2 3 4 | Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\system] "VerboseStatus"=dword:00000001 |
This registry hack can be applied to the following Microsoft boxes…
- Microsoft Windows XP Professional
- Microsoft Windows 2000 Server
- Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server
- Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Edition
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition for Itanium-Based Systems
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition for Itanium-based Systems
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-bit x86)
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition (32-bit x86)
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition (32-bit x86)
- Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 Standard Edition
- Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 Premium Edition
I had this problem on a Windows 2003 server. Would hang for at least 30 minutes saying “Applying Computer Settings…”. It would never go to the login screen. I gave up a couple times and cut the power to try booting up again. I noticed that my FSB frequency would keep moving to the wrong setting everytime I cut the power. I finally booted into safe mode and found that my clock was also resetting back to the year of my last bios update. 2003. Yes, it’s time to flash the bios. I had a dead battery on the motherboard. Replaced the battery, set the clock to the correct time and it booted up and went immediately to the login screen. It was the date/time causing the wait… Problem solved.