Windows Active Directory or Windows AD uses gpupdate in order to update and refresh group policies of the computers in Active Directory Domain. This tool is automatically run at some intervals. But in some cases this mechanism may not work properly and the computer can not get recent Domain Policy.

Help

Detailed help information about the gpupdate can be printed with the /? or /h like below.

> gpupdate /?

Refresh and Update

We will start with a simple example. We will just issue gpupdate and refresh Group policy of Computer and Users. As we can see following screenshot we do not provide any option or parameter.

> gpupdate

Force Refresh and Update

In some cases we need to force gpupdate if it is not working properly. We will provide the /force option in this example.

> gpupdate /force

Logoff After Policy Update

If specifically test the User Policies we may nedd to log off from current user session. We can provide this as /Logoff option like below.

> gpupdate /Logoff

Restart After Policy Update

If the policy update will require some restart of the Computer we can use /Boot option like below.

> gpupdate /Boot

Update Only User Policies

If we only interested with updating and refreshing User Group policies we can specify it with the /Target:User option like below.

> gpupdate /Target:User

Update Only Computer Policies

We can also update only Computer policies with the similar option /Target by providing the Computer like below.

> gpupdate /Target:Computer