Would you like to learn how to use a group policy to disable the Guest user account? In this tutorial, we will show you how to disable the Guest user account on all computers in the domain using a GPO.

• Windows 2012 R2
• Windows 2016
• Windows 2019
• Windows 10
• Windows 7

Hardware List:

The following section presents the list of equipment used to create this Windows tutorial.

Every piece of hardware listed above can be found at Amazon website.

Tutorial GPO - Disable the Guest account

On the domain controller, open the group policy management tool.

Windows 2012 - Group Policy Management

Create a new group policy.

Windows 2012 - Group Policy Objects

Enter a name for the new group policy.

Windows - Add GPO

In our example, the new GPO was named: MY-GPO.

On the Group Policy Management screen, expand the folder named Group Policy Objects.

Right-click your new Group Policy Object and select the Edit option.

Windows - Edit GPO

On the group policy editor screen, expand the Computer configuration folder and locate the following item.

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Access the Security options.

GPO - Disable Guest user

Access the option named Guest account status.

Disable the Guest user account.

GPO - Disable Guest account

To save the group policy configuration, you need to close the Group Policy editor.

Congratulations! You have finished the GPO creation.

Tutorial - Applying the GPO to disable the Guest account

On the Group policy management screen, you need to right-click the Organizational Unit desired and select the option to link an existent GPO.

Windows-2012-Applocker application

In our example, we are going to link the group policy named MY-GPO to the root of the domain.

GPO- tutorial linking

After applying the GPO you need to wait for 10 or 20 minutes.

During this time the GPO will be replicated to other domain controllers.

To test the configuration, verify the status of the Guest account on a remote computer.

Here is the Guest user account, before our configuration.

GPO - Disable Guest user accout

Here is the Guest user account, after our configuration.

GPO - Guest account disabled

In our example, the Guest user account was disabled on all domain computers using a GPO.