Question About Group Policy Editor and Registry

Just trying to understand 100% how it works.

So it's not included and doesn't work on Windows 10 Home. It essentially provides a user/enterprise-friendly way of changing deep settings for the PC and it adds registry keys in a respective directory in the registry based on whether you enable or disable a setting. When something it set to enabled or disabled, the Group Policy Editor setting takes precedence and controls the value in the registry unless it says otherwise, but if it's set to "Not Configured", the setting is either left at default or is controlled by whatever the value in the registry is currently set to.

Is this all correct? Do I have this right?

Also one sub question, I notice alot of option values are missing from registry on fresh installs before they're changed through UI. In alot of cases changing the option through either the Windows UI or the Group Policy Editor seems to create the registry key. So my question is, what controls the setting if there's no value or key in regedit and it hasn't been touched in Group Policy Editor yet?

When you have Group Policy Editor, the template will normally explain what happens if a setting is undefined.

You can also search Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 Group Policy Administrative Templates, which mirrors the template text.

In this guide, i will guide you to install the Group Policy Editor for Windows 11 and Windows 10 Home edition.

Try3 said:

In all previous guides on this subject, the GPE in Home has turned out to be purely a viewer, a Registry reader that is not capable of changing any Registry entries.
Is that still the case?

Denis

GPE at home edition some policy still works but to be safe OP can use Policy Plus app.

In this video guide, you’ll learn the steps to get started with Policy Plus to change advanced settings on Windows Home Edition.

TheCars said:

Just trying to understand 100% how it works.
Also one sub question, I notice alot of option values are missing from registry on fresh installs before they're changed through UI. In alot of cases changing the option through either the Windows UI or the Group Policy Editor seems to create the registry key. So my question is, what controls the setting if there's no value or key in regedit and it hasn't been touched in Group Policy Editor yet?

In this case the software will typically have a default value hard coded somewhere. A developer has many options here and there may be no easy way to see what it is. This is easy to do in software, The software will check if the value is present and use the default if not. The advantage of doing it this way is you can revert to the default value by simply deleting the registry value. People often change registry values without noting the original value.

Don't assume that all registry values work this way.