GPO with focus on security?

Lately I have been looking at GPO to lock down machines in my home. I've been spending time on google looking for anything I can find on any "best practices" or "industry standard" types of templates, but have not come up with a whole heck of a lot. Pretty much everything is dated/uncurrent.

Anyone got a great source on this? Seems many hits are for outside it/consulting with nothing current.

There really isn't anything standard practice in group policies, it is really tailored to the environment.

I would suggest that you leave all the default policies alone, and create GPO's for each thing you want to control. That is a pretty standard practice of never touching the default policies. Also leverage OU's to enforce certain policies on objects (users and computers) and not on others.

Long time since I have looked at his but doesn't the baselines in SCM give you a start?

http://blogs.technet.com/b/secguide/archive/2014/08/13/security-baselines-for-windows-8-1-windows-server-2012-r2-and-internet-explorer-11-final.aspx

These are obviously tailored at the enterprise, not home.

Cool, I'll check these out. Anything else to look at?

In our org environment, we based a lot on the USGCB (US Government Baseline)

http://usgcb.nist.gov/usgcb/documentation/windows_settings_comparison.xls

From:
http://usgcb.nist.gov/usgcb/microsoft/download_win7.html

Spreadsheet also contains DOD recommended settings.