is gpedit on windows 10 home?

Since this was an advanced feature, Microsoft didn’t include it in the Home & Starter editions of Windows. But there might be some scenarios where you wish to modify policy settings in Microsoft Management Console (MMC) from a Home Edition of Windows. In any such cases, you will need to use a third-party tool to do that. In this post, we’ll talk about a tool called ‘Policy Plus’ that lets you make changes to the Group Policy settings even from the Home editions of Windows 11/10/8/7.

Related: Windows cannot find GPEDIT.MSC.

Policy Plus is a free open source tool that makes it possible to edit Local Group Policy Object on a Home edition of Windows. But you may wonder if this feature was not available in Home edition, is it legal to use this tool? Yes, the tool is in complete compliance with licensing, and you are free to use it without violating any terms.

If you have already used Group Policy Editor, you might be aware of administrative templates. These templates are actually the basis of the tool. While some of the administrative templates are available in Home Edition, you need to download the rest of them from the internet. Policy Plus comes with inbuilt functionality to download the latest package of these files from Microsoft. All you need to do is run the tool and then go to ‘Help’ and select ‘Acquire AMDX Files’. This will download the full set of policy definitions from Microsoft.

Talking about the UI, it is specifically designed keeping in mind the original Group Policy Editor. The interface resembles a lot with the original tool, and you might not face any problems if you are familiar with Group Policy Editor. All the available policies are displayed in the left column. You can navigate through the tree and find a suitable entry that you want to edit.

This tool can easily view and edit Registry-based policies in local GPOs, per-user GPOs, individual POL files, offline Registry user hives, and the live Registry.

You can also use the search functionality to find a specific policy. You can search by ID, registry keys or simply by text. Editing a policy is as simple, you need to click open a policy and make the desired change. Similar to the native Group Policy Editor, Policy Plus also displays the policy description and lets you add comments.

Once you’ve made changes to a Group Policy Object, you need to restart your computer for the changes to take effect.

Features in a nutshell:

The RefreshPolicyEx function does not work on Home edition, so restart your computer to observe the changes. Also, you can create and edit per-user GPOs, but their settings are ignored by Windows. So, you need to edit the registry yourself for those changes to take place.

Overall, Policy Plus is a great tool. It almost brings a complete Local Group Policy Editor to Windows 11/10/8/7 Home Editions. You can use this tool freely and even compile the source from scratch. There might be some issues with the tool because it is still in the development stage, but you can report issues to its developers.

Visit Github to download Policy Plus for Windows.

Microsoft also offers an undocumented way to enable GPEDIT in Windows Home editions as follows.

Sign in as an administrator, stay connected to the internet and execute the following command one after the other in an elevated command prompt windows:

Once done restart your computer and see.

On the restart, you will be able to open the Group Policy Editor, but some administrative templates may be missing. You can manually download and install ADMX files; however, do remember that not all features are available on the Home edition. Multiple Local Group Policies (MLGPOs) are also not supported on Windows Home. You should also note that Windows Home users will have to necessarily restart their computer to apply new settings.

TIP: Here’s how to install Hyper-V on Windows 11/10 Home.

Related reads:

As we all know, there are some differences between the Home and Professional versions of Windows 10. One of these is the missing gpedit.msc or Local Group Policy Editor in the Home edition, but it can always be installed manually.

There are a couple of ways you can do that, including running a few commands or using a reliable alternative to Local Group Policy Editor. We will focus on the former in the following sections.

The Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) cannot be accessed by default in any Home or Starter edition of Windows 10, and the same can be applied to previous Windows releases such as Windows 7, though the Pro and Enterprise editions have it built-in.

This isn’t the only component that’s missing, but the same goes for Group Policy Management Console. Luckily, we have a guide on how to install Group Policy Management Console that can help you with that.

1. Type cmd in the Search bar, and click on Run as administrator.

2. Click Yes in the UAC prompt.

3. Paste the following two commands one at a time, and hit Enter after each:FOR %F IN ("%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~*.mum") DO ( DISM /Online /NoRestart /Add-Package:"%F" ) FOR %F IN ("%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~*.mum") DO ( DISM /Online /NoRestart /Add-Package:"%F" )

4. To verify if the Local Group Policy Editor is installed, press Windows + R  to open Run, type gpedit.msc and click OK.

If your PC does not have Group Policy Editor enabled, you can easily tweak some settings to enable it. For this, you will have to use Command Prompt.

And once done, you will have gpedit.msc running in Windows 10 Home. If you have any troubles with DISM, check out what to do if DISM commands fail in Windows 10.

Windows will now force update the policies on your computer, and it should also fix issues with gpedit.msc.

Once done, check if you are now able to launch gpedit.msc in Windows.

That being said, if you managed to open gpedit.msc, you might also be interested in finding out how to edit a Group Policy in Windows 10.

If you have any other questions, leave them in the comments section below, and we’ll be sure to take a look.

• Download Group Policy Editor (gpedit.
• Right-click on the downloaded zip file then selects Extract here.
• You will see a Setup.exe where you extracted the archive.
• Right-click on the Setup.exe and select Run as Administrator.

Press Win + R to open the Run menu, enter gpedit. msc, and hit Enter to launch the Local Group Policy Editor. Press Win to open the search bar or, if you're using Windows 10, press Win + Q to summon Cortana, enter gpedit.

Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) is a separate MMC snap-in, which is essentially a graphical add-in for easy management of Windows settings stored in the registry. When you change the settings of a policy, the editor immediately makes changes to the associated registry parameter. Instead of looking for the necessary key and manually editing the registry parameter, it is much easier to find and edit the setting in the gpedit.msc editor. The GPO editor contains more than three thousand Windows settings, which are located in a coherent hierarchy, have a detailed description, and offer predefined configuration options to choose from.

To open the Local Group Policy Editor in Windows, just run the gpedit.msc command in the command prompt, PowerShell, or in the Run window (Win+R).

The Local GPO Editor Console is a simple tree structure with sections. All settings in the gpedit.msc console are divided into two large sections:

There are three subsections in each configuration section:

To change any GPO setting in the console, you need to find the section in which it is located and open its settings in the right GPO editor pane.

By default, all settings in the Administrative Templates section are set to Not configured. Most GPO settings have only three options available: Enabled, Disabled, or Not configured.

In order to change the policy, just set it to a value you need and click OK. In this example, we have set a parameter to Enabled, which means this Windows setting is enabled. If you selected Disabled, you have disabled the configurable Windows parameter.

Some GPO settings can have additional parameters that can be configured in the Options section. For example, to set a desktop wallpaper file through a GPO, you need to enable the policy, specify the path to a jpg file in the Wallpaper name field, and select a wallpaper style.

A description of each Group Policy setting is available in the Help field. And the Supported on field indicates the Windows versions for which this policy applies. For example, At least Windows 10 means the policy only applies to Windows 10/11 and Windows Server 2016/2019/2022. This GPO option won’t work on Windows 8.1 or 7.

Settings are set in the gpedit.msc editor take high priority and overwrite any settings set by the user or administrator in the Windows GUI or via Control Panel/Settings.

All applied settings of local policies are stored in registry.pol files in the folders:

You can convert these pol files into a convenient text format using the lgpo.exe tool. If you delete pol files from these folders, you will reset all Local Group Policy settings to the default NotConfigured state (this is useful when, after changing some Windows settings through the local policies, the computer starts blocking user login or doesn’t boot).

If you try to run the command to launch the Group Policy Editor on Windows 10 or Windows 11 Home/Home Single Language ( Win + R -> gpedit.msc), you will receive an error:

It is likely that, according to the Microsoft logic, the home user doesn’t need to edit the local settings through the gpedit.msc GUI. Accordingly, users of the Windows 10 home editions have to make changes through the registry editor regedit.exe, which is not so clear and more risky since it is possible to make a mistake and break the system.

Fortunately, Windows 10 Home has the undocumented option to install the gpedit.msc editor from the Windows image packages and manifests repository (\Windows\servicing\packages).

To install the Local Group Policy Editor in Windows 10 Home edition, open a command prompt as administrator and run two one-line commands in sequence:

FOR %F IN ("%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~*.mum") DO (DISM /Online /NoRestart /Add-Package:"%F") FOR %F IN ("%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~*.mum") DO (DISM /Online /NoRestart /Add-Package:"%F")

For convenience, you can save this code to a text file gpedit-install.bat and run it as administrator. Wait a while until DISM installs the packages from the Windows 10 component store.

In my case, the ClientTools and ClientExtensions packages were installed in Windows 10 Home:

Now try to run the gpedit.msc console. The Local Group Policy Editor interface should open (no reboot required). The GPO editor is fully functional even in the Home edition of Windows 10 or Windows 11, and contains all the necessary policy sections that are available in the Pro/Enterprise editions.

You can also use the free third-party Policy Plus tool to edit local Group Policy settings in Windows. This utility is a cool alternative to the built-in Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc) for all versions of Windows. You can download the utility from the GitHub repository: https://github.com/Fleex255/PolicyPlus.

Download and run Policy Plus as an administrator (the program is portable and doesn’t require installation).

As you can see, the Policy Plus console interface is very similar to the gpedit.msc: a tree with sections in the left window and policies in the right window.

The Policy Plus functionality significantly exceeds the capabilities of the built-in policy editor gpedit.msc. The tool allows you to link the administrative template files (admx), and if necessary, you can download the latest admx file versions from the Microsoft site (Help -> Acquire AMDX Files). This operation is a must-do for users of Home editions of Windows 10, since most of the administrative template files are missing.

Policy Plus has a convenient built-in policy search. You can search by text, policy description, related registry keys.

You can edit the GPO setting of the offline Windows image, load POL policy files, and export Group Policy settings to a file in order to transfer them to other computers (Import / Export reg and pol files). In this case, you don’t even need to use LocalGPO or LGPO tools to copy the local GPO settings between computers.

You can use the built-in Element Inspector to see which registry keys are modified by each policy parameter, as well as the possible values for the registry parameter.

If you some parts fail ( dont install do this)… this one worked for me xD

D. Admin OCTOBER 29, 2016 @ 5:31 AM To everyone experiencing errors installing the snap in, the following might be of some importance to you:

You are more than likely experiencing errors because the program itself lacks the permissions to write to the required folders in ‘C:\Windows’, regardless of your account being an “administrator” account. The permissions for an account categorized as ‘Administrator’ when you create the account only gives access to useful areas of the system, but not the elevated permissions required to perform certain tasks.

1.) Under ‘C:\Windows’, perform the following:

Right Click > Properties > Security Tab > Advanced Button

A window launches that lists the folder permissions. There might actually be two different sets of permissions listed for “Administrator” depending on the subfolder you are in. Your administrator account is limited when it comes to the OS folders.

To allow the install to successfully copy the files and folders to the proper locations, you must perform the following:

2.) From an admin account, launch an elevated command prompt. There are several ways to do this:

a.) Windows Key > Type ‘cmd’ > Right Click ‘cmd’ shortcut > Run As Administrator

b.) Right Click Start Menu > Click ‘Command Prompt (Admin)’

If you are successful, a command prompt will launch with the home directory of cmd.exe, which is ‘C:\Windows\system32’

3.) At the prompt, type ‘net user administrator /active:yes’

If you are successful the console will print a line telling you so. This will activate the master ‘Administrator’ account that belongs to the system for these such cases. (You cannot run some programs from this account, specifically many of the UWP apps for Windows 10.)

4.) Log out of your current ‘Administrator’ account. 5.) When you are returned to the user login screen you should now see a new account titled ‘Administrator’. Click it to login and wait for the environment to be setup by Windows for the first run.