Set Ethernet Connection as Metered or Unmetered in Windows 10  

Hey Bree,
Why do you change the access & permissions back after you make the change? I didn't do that in the past. I kept full access and ownership.

Brink said:

Originally Posted by roystreet Hey Bree,
Why do you change the access & permissions back after you make the change? I didn't do that in the past. I kept full access and ownership.

You don't need to unless you just wanted to prevent it from being changed again.

I just like to leave a minimal impact on the MS default permissions, putting them back the way I found them once I've made changes. I don't want to find out the hard way that a modified permission from a while back stops Windows working if MS ever decide to make changes of their own.

Here's the error I'm getting..

OK, this is what I did...
I switched to another local account on the machine that I basically never use. I went back to the regedit key. I took ownership in my specific username, not the admin group. I added specifically my username instead of the group to have full access
This method worked [emoji848]

FWIW - I found a more straightforward way to change the registry key but it involves a download.

Using pstools (a free suite of command-line remote access tools from Sysinternals), I was able to run the registry editor while bypassing any issues of having to take ownership, set and reset permissions, or import registry files.

The relevant utility is psexec (or psexec64 as applicable) which allows, among other things, you to run any executable from the local system account. I have often used this as a brute-force method of overcoming annoying file permissions hurdles due to unintended consequences of UAC. It occurred to me, after using this tutorial, that it would be great for overcoming registry permissions too.

The relevant command would be:

psexec -i -s regedit.exe

or

psexec64 -i -s regedit.exe

(command line explanation: -s means "run as local system account"; -i means "interactive mode")

From there, go to the defaultmediacost subkey as in the original tutorial, change the value for Ethernet from 1 to 2, exit, and reboot. Poof. All in one step without worrying about undoing any unintended residual changes.

Unfortunately, my main purpose for this is to stop updates from being forced on me until I'm ready for them. It appears though it still allows some updates.

I've changed the value to make it a metered connection and it still downloaded and updated. On the Pro version, I can just change the Group Policy and write a little program to stop BITS from starting up.

Hi. I've got this problem since some months ago. My W10 can't meter data. I tried this tutorial and it's still like this: 0 Mb