One of the things I don’t like about Windows 7 is that it lacks any kind of start up messages, for my domain users.  When they boot up their computer all they see is “Please Wait”  I have had users think that their computer was frozen and pull the plug on it when actually it was installing a software patch via group policy.  But I found an easy fix for this in group policy.

The setting is found under Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / System / Verbose vs Normal Status Messages
By enabling this setting you will get descriptive messages when your domain computers boot up and shut down.  I have found that it gets a little too descriptive on XP machines, but I would rather have too much info than not enough.