You might be wondering why I'm bothering to make this video if there's already other tutorials out
there on how to get the Group Policy Editor on Windows 10 and 11 Home and not Pro. Well,
unfortunately all those other tutorials don't work. Now let me be clear, they will get the
Group Policy Editor onto the computer and running. But as I'll show you, if you go to actually change
any settings using the Group Policy Editor, it won't actually apply on the back end.
Nothing will actually take effect. However, I will show you how you can change those group
policy settings and have them take effect using a third-party program called Policy
Plus. Though that program still has some quirks you'll need to understand. So be
sure to stick around so you're not left wondering why nothing is still working.
A real quick note if you're not sure what the heck I'm talking about with the Group Policy Editor,
it's basically a very useful tool in the Pro editions of Windows and higher,
where it lets you change a ton of settings that are not available in the normal Windows
settings menus and would require editing the registry to change.
In Windows 10 and 11 Pro, you can simply search the start menu or run "gpedit.msc" and it will
come up, but obviously not in Home. Now the solution I've seen everyone else giving for
how to get the Group Policy Editor onto Windows Home is to create a batch file
with a few commands that basically installs the Group Policy Editor packages manually.
And if you do that, it does appear to work. If you search the start menu for gpedit.msc,
it comes up and it opens, and it appears to work exactly as you'd expect. Except
not really. Let me demonstrate. Here are two examples. One is under Computer Configuration,
Administrative Templates, Desktop, and then you enable "Hide and Disable All Items on Desktop."
What this should do, among other things, is hide all the desktop icons here. But as
you can see if I set it. And even if I do "GPUpdate /Force", and even if I restart,
nothing happens. The icons are still there. And I tried this on both Windows 11 Home and Windows
10 Home virtual machines, and it worked in neither of them.
Another example is in User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Start Menu and Taskbar,
and then I enabled "Remove All Programs List from the Start Menu." And then in there,
I also set the option "Remove and Disable Setting." What this should do is remove
the "All Apps" button from the Start Menu, like it does here in Windows Pro.
But again, here in Home, it doesn't happen even if I do the update command,
and even after a restart. But there is a solution. Before we get to that,
I want to give a shout out to my hilarious hysterical Instagram account. I try to post
funny stuff on there every once in a while, usually stories. Be careful if
you have a heart condition, you might die of a heart attack from laughing so hard.
So if you want to check that out, it's just at ThioJoe over on Instagram. Alright so
here's how to get those policy settings to actually apply. And you will need a third
party program called Policy Plus. It's available on GitHub, it is open source,
and I'll put the links in the description. I should point out the author considers the software
pre-release, so it might not be perfect, though I haven't seen any issues with it personally.
And it doesn't require an install, you just download it from the releases
page and run it. It may prompt you to download the latest policy settings,
like this. If it does do that, just go through the steps and download it to update it. Interestingly,
when you run Policy Plus, it will actually detect the changed settings if you already
had changed some in the Group Policy Editor, even if they didn't apply.
Which means that the Group Policy Editor trick did actually save the settings somewhere,
but they still didn't work. Which is weird. Anyway, in Policy Plus you change the policy
settings just like you would in the real Group Policy Editor. But here's
the difference. After you have set it, you go to File, and then Save Policies.
And apparently this actually goes and writes the changes into the registry. Though keep in mind,
for most settings you will still need to restart to apply them, so let's do that.
And now you can see there are no more icons on the desktop because of the one setting,
and the start menu also no longer shows the "All Apps" button like the other one.
So it worked. Policy Plus should have all the same settings as the Group
Policy Editor. The layout is a bit different. Instead of the tree view
with "Computer Configuration" and "User Configuration," it's actually a drop down
here. But I think most of the other stuff is pretty similarly labeled. Based on all this,
I would say it's not even worth it to do the trick to install the Group Policy Editor.
It won't work, and it will just leave you confused if you forget that's the case. Now one thing I
want to point out, I vaguely remember reading that the Group Policy Editor installation trick
may have worked in the past, but only recently in Windows 11 hasn't worked. But like I showed you,
I tried it in a Windows 10 virtual machine, and that also didn't work,
so it seems like at best it's not reliable. So I still wouldn't bother with it.
In any case, now you at least have access to all those interesting Group Policy settings,
even if it does require a third party program. So let me know if this helped
you out down in the comments, maybe before you were trying to get it to
work and you couldn't understand why, and then this actually helped you.
Also, maybe I missed something and there's a reason why it wasn't working,
you can let me know down in the comments for that too. If you enjoyed this video,
be sure to give it a big thumbs up for the algorithm, and if you want to subscribe,
I try to make videos usually Wednesday and Saturday, so it should be worth it.
If you want to keep watching, the next video I'd recommend is where
I was talking about a really cool program and method for preventing
corruption in files that you probably have never heard of before, so definitely worth
it if you archive and backup lots of files in storage. So I'll put that link right there.
So thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.