Would you like to learn how to use a group policy to disable the local administrator account? In this tutorial, we will show you how to disable the local administrator user account on all computers in the domain using a GPO.
• Windows 2012 R2
• Windows 2016
• Windows 2019
• Windows 10
• Windows 7
Be careful not to lose access to the computer.
Add a domain account as a member of the local group named Administrators.
Equipment list
The following section presents the list of equipment used to create this tutorial.
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Tutorial GPO – Disable the local administrator account
On the domain controller, open the group policy management tool.
Create a new group policy.
Enter a name for the new group policy.
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.
On the group policy editor screen, expand the Computer configuration folder and locate the following item.
Access the Security options.
Access the option named Accounts: Administrator account status.
Disable the local administrator 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 local administrator 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.
In our example, we are going to link the group policy named MY-GPO to the root of the domain.
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 local administrator account on a remote computer.
Here is the local administrator account, before our configuration.
Here is the local administrator account, after our configuration.
In our example, the local administrator account was disabled on all domain computers using a GPO.
