How to enable gpedit.msc on Windows 10 Home Edition

As we all know, there are some differences between the Home and Professional versions of Windows 10. If the main features that are included in the Pro build are related to networking management capabilities, there is one small feature that is also disabled by default in the Home platform: the Group Policy Editor.

Actually, the Group Policy Editor cannot be accessed in any Home or Starter edition of Windows 10 – and the same can be applied if we discuss about previous Windows releases such as Windows 8.1, Windows 7 or even Windows XP.

The Group Policy Editor is an extremely useful feature which can offer intuitive support in term of network settings, local computer settings, or user configuration. Of course, all these capabilities can also be modified or tweaked through the Windows Registry, though the actual process is far more complicated. Don’t forget, if you are not an advanced user it’s not recommended to change anything within Windows Registry – if you mess things up you can then experience different and major malfunctions that can affect the way you use your Windows 10 computer or notebook.

Therefore, the best thing to do is to keep everything simple. And, in our case that can be achieved easily, by learning how to enable Group Policy Editor in Windows 10 Home Edition. Now, the Group Policy Editor is not entirely gone from Home Edition. It is still there, with all its main files installed, but it’s disabled by default. So, your job is to activate it in order to enable the gpedit.msc command, which brings the Editor on your computer.

You can activate the feature by executing dism commands. DISM, or Deployment Image Servicing and Management is a command-line utility that can help you troubleshoot different problems on Windows. For example, you can execute dism commands for repair or prepare Windows images, for recover the image used on the Windows installation process, for activating different services located within the Windows core system, and lot more. Well, in our case we will use the command line service for enabling gpedit.msc on Windows 10 Home Edition.

Steps to enable Group Policy Editor on Windows 10 Home

1. First, you can find all the packages associated with the Group Policy Editor under ‘%SystemRoot%servicingPackages’.
2. The files matching the Policy Editor are: ‘Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package*.mum’, respectively ‘Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package*.mum’.
3. Now, that you know these aspects you can activate gpedit.msc.
4. Just press Win+X keyboard keys and choose ‘Command promt (admin)’. Or you can create a new task with administrative rights.
5. This will bring up the elevated command prompt window.
6. There you have to execute the following command: ‘dism /online /norestart /add-package:”%SystemRoot%servicingPackages{{PackageFileName}}’ (enter the command without quotations).
7. That’s it; now you can press Win+R for launching the search box and enter gpedit.msc and reach Group Policy Editor on your Windows 10 Home Edition.

There are other ways in which you can enable Group Policy Editor but using the steps from below represents the safest solution. Alternatively you can download a third party app (a batch executable file) which will automatically enable gpedit.msc on your computer.

However, if you choose to run a third party app, make sure you are downloading something that was already tested by other users; otherwise you might end up damaging Windows 10.

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