In this computer experiment, I broke my own rule and not only did try this at home,
but I also used it on one of my actual computers, not in a virtual machine. And I'll give the reason
why in a minute. But the topic today is the Group Policy Editor in Windows. Maybe you've
heard of it, maybe not. But it is accessible if you have at least the Pro version of Windows.
And it basically allows you to change a whole bunch, I'm talking thousands of settings,
in Windows. Some of which are only changeable through this group policy editor,
or at least if you don't want to have to go into the registry to change it.
Though a vast majority of these settings are not going to be very interesting to the normal user.
They're usually settings related to managing multiple computers for businesses,
enterprises and stuff, and it can be used to prevent users from messing with those
certain settings. You can, for example, lock down some settings so they can't be changed,
especially security settings, that sort of thing, but a whole bunch of other stuff.
So one day I had the genius idea, what if I went through all 2500 of the different group policy
settings and disabled them all? Had this ever been done before, what would happen? Would the
computer becomes so unusable because everything is completely locked down? I don't know. We're about
to find out. And I need to point out this was not as simple as I thought it was going to be.
I actually spent way more time just figuring out how to accomplish this
than actually doing. Before we continue, though, I want to thank today's sponsor,
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that out. And with all that being said, let's continue. All right. Let me explain
how I accomplished this. So you actually know what the heck is going on when I show
you. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to bulk update all the settings at once.
I'm sure there is a way to do it with PowerShell scripts or something like that, but
I had a deadline for this video, so I couldn't just spend all day trying to figure that out,
and I decided to just brute force it. So I created basically a macro to go through
literally every single setting, and just disable it manually.
And for this, I used a tool that I believe is actually included in Windows now called
Power Automate Desktop, and it lets you create pretty complex automations,
or in the program they're called flows, and there's basically like macros except a lot
more powerful. So I created one that looks at the settings window and then clicks the "disabled"
radio button and then clicks on "next setting" and then repeats that a whole bunch of times.
Now I sort of overcomplicated it by having it read a text file that had the exported list
of all of them, so it would have the correct number of them, when I could have just put the
number in. But I was just kind of seeing what was possible at that point. And the reason I had to do
all of this in one of my actual computers, not in a virtual machine, is because when
I was trying to do it in a virtual machine , the macros, they wouldn't work correctly.
So I said whatever we'll fix it later. And theoretically, it shouldn't be hard to put
back. I think there's a folder with all the settings in there, so I should be able to just
back that up and replace it again at the end, and it should go back to normal. So
here's what happened after I got started, I did get the macro running where it would wait for
the window and then look for it and click the next button in the disable button and all that.
But it was way too slow. You can see how slow is going. I let it go for about five minutes,
but it would have taken hours if I had let it go at this speed,
and there was like 2500 settings. So instead of having the macro look at the different Windows UI
elements, I figured I would just put in the number of tabs it took to get
to the disable setting in the number of Arrow keys to press down to select it.
And this did work at first and was way faster, it was going extremely quickly. But then I ran
into a new problem, which was that randomly all these weird error messages kept popping up as
it was changing them , and that would throw off the timing or the sequence of the different tabs.
Meaning that some would not be disabled, some were being enabled.
It was kind of messing everything up. And the reason for these error messages, they were all
file-access related, and it was saying that the file was in use. So I believe every time
you change a setting, I guess in one of these windows, it writes that change to a file. So
because it was trying to change them so fast, it wasn't able to open and closed the file,
I guess, quick enough to update the changes so fast. So it was throwing
error. For this one I did decide to keep it running a little bit longer because
most of them were actually changing to disabled and I figured I could come back to them later
to fix them. But then I had a breakthrough, because I realized if I pressed the 'D' key,
then it would instantly jump to the disabled setting and enable it at the same time.
So then I just had to do a Shift-Tab to go back to the "next"
button and hit Enter on that. So instead of having to tab
all the way over to the disabled setting, it would just jump right to it. So that should fix the
issue of even if an error message came up, then it would always still go to the disabled setting.
But even this brought up a new problem, which was that when a error message did come up,
the 'D' key was now actually making the details button on the error message get activated. So
that just kept being activated, and then it would get stuck in this pop up,
never closing. So what I finally came up for as a solution is instead of using tabs at all,
I realized I can go to basically any of the buttons using letter keys.
So I had the macro now for each window. Press C, D, N. And I believe the C might
not even be necessary here, but basically the C makes it jump over to the "not configured",
and then the D makes it go to "disabled", and then hitting the 'N' would make it go to the 'Next',
and then you hit Enter to go to the next window and it repeats.
But now with this when an error message pops up. Yes, the 'D' Key will still make it go
to the Details button. But the N key, because I guess it's the third letter in "continue",
it for some reason makes it go to the Continue button . So when it hits Enter,
it also closes the error message. So this way it covers both scenarios.
If it's the regular settings menu, it changes it to Disabled,
goes to Next and then goes the next window by hitting Enter. And if it's an error message,
it just moves it to the Continue button and then hits Enter to close it, and then keeps
going. And also, one of the best things here is that when it closes out the error message,
it starts going through the loop again and it actually stays in the same setting.
So even if the error message comes up multiple times, it'll keep trying on
that same setting until it actually changes. So it's not even going to be skipping over
any settings. If there's an error message, so it should be able to go through every
single one. And therefore I can just have this macro run this key sequence as fast as I want,
and it won't skip over any, and it'll never go to the wrong settings,
so it's perfect. So that's what I did. I let it go for about ten minutes and that's all it took,
and then it was finished. Then because from before some were actually set to Enabled or
Not Configured. I just sorted by those and then ran it again and finished those off. Strangely,
though, there were a few settings where I couldn't change it from Not Configured.
There were only a few of those, though I'm not really sure why, but I figured "whatever,
I'm just going to ignore those". But I wasn't done yet because these were all the
Admin Template settings. But there's also User Settings in the group policy editor,
which is another 1800 settings. So I went into that one
and ran the same macro and I was able to quickly finish those up too.
And for that one, I actually decreased the time between the macro keystrokes. So it
was even faster at like four minutes. So now, after actually having disabled everything in
the group policy editor, I can now look through Windows and see if anything has changed. First
I started out in the settings and there wasn't really anything too obvious yet.
One thing I did notice is that the widgets were disabled and I couldn't re-enable it.
I'm not sure if that was one of the settings, but I just noticed. Then when I went into the
security settings, I saw one that definitely was from a setting, and it said that the Dynamic Lock
was managed by your administrator and I couldn't change that.
Then when further looking through the security settings, I realized
that it had also disabled the firewall, which obviously is not good. I immediately went and
disconnected from the internet just to be safe, and then kept looking. Then I went to
look back at the group policy editor again and realized that it was not letting me do that,
it disabled the group policy editor. So it's like that meme. I used the group policy editor
to destroy the group policy editor. I also tried running it through the command prompt,
even as it administrator. And no, it would not let me do it. And it turns out a bunch
of the other management consoles were also disabled, because I wanted to go and try
to enable the super user admin account, which is in the user management console.
And when I tried to open that one, that too blocked it from opening. And if you haven't
seen my video about the super admin account, I did make a video about that before. Fortunately,
there is just a command prompt command you can use to enable it. So that's not
a problem. So I switched to the secret admin backup account, whatever you want to call it,
and tried opening the group policy editor there as this super admin.
And wow, it actually blocked this one too. So that was a little bit surprising. So
apparently these group policy settings apply even to the admin accounts on this computer.
So then I just switched back to the other account. Looking through more of the settings,
I noticed that BitLocker said some settings were managed by the system administrator,
and when I tried clicking TPM Administration, nope, that's blocked too,
apparently that's a management console, that doesn't let you go in there. Though interestingly,
it did let me open the disk manager, which made me wonder, wait a minute, which of these
are enabled and which aren't? So I went into the start menu and put an
MMC which lets you manage the different management consoles.
And it looks like the only ones that were left were the disk management, one called "folder",
I'm not really sure what that's for, print management and the task scheduler. Looking
through more stuff, it looks like Cortana is disabled. And also I apparently can't
set the time zone automatically, you have to manually set the time zone.
And I can't change the date or time manually either, or even show additional calendars in the
taskbar. Some other things I noticed were disabled were clipboard history. I couldn't enable that,
or remote desktop either. So overall, disabling everything in that group policy settings
obviously did not break Windows, but there definitely were some weird inconveniences.
Most of the time, it just prevents you from changing settings.
But there are some things that you just won't be able to do and are pretty significant
inconveniences. But it seemed like their usual use of the computer overall was not
really affected. It was just kind of like little settings here and there. Though I should point
out that in the group policy settings, there are plenty that are kind of like double negatives.
So the setting is to "don't allow" something to be changed. So the way to add more restrictions
there would be to Enable it. So there are more restrictions you can add by
using other group policy settings, like not allowing customization of the background,
I think, and colors and stuff like that. But I was just going through and disabling
everything. And like I mentioned at the beginning, getting back to normal.
Fortunately, it was not a problem. I was able to simply copy a couple of folders
where these settings are stored in System32. I had backed it up ahead of time and I just
copied it back, and then it was all good and back to normal. So this experiment
was definitely not as destructive as some of the previous ones I've done.
But I think it was still interesting nonetheless, and it's definitely something I kind of was
curious about the second I thought of it. Thanks again to Morning Brew for sponsoring this video,
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Now, if you do want to watch something a little bit more destructive,
I did make a video a while back deleting System32 as an experiment so you can
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You don't want that to get lost in the rest of your subscriptions. So
thanks so much for watching guys, and I'll see you in the next video.