Help me with Windows 7!

[RedBaron]

Alright so I'm hoping that some of you here are familiar with gpedit.msc and group policy settings. The problem that I have is that I am running Windows 7 Home Premium... and gpedit is not included in this version by default. I have since dug around the web and found THIS (http://www.askvg.com/how-to-enable-group-policy-editor-gpedit-msc-in-windows-7-home-premium-home-basic-and-starter-editions/comment-page-12/#comment-709207) guide to add gpedit. I did all of their steps and gpedit seems to be working correctly now; the GUI can be launched and looks pretty much the same as the Windows 7 Ultimate version.

My problem now is that my gpedit is missing a whole bunch of the Administrative Templates that are normally found in the Ultimate counterpart. The post I made on the page pretty much summarizes the rest:


I have since done some digging and downloaded the entire library of stock Windows 7 admin templates from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=6243
(http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=6243)
After some more digging, I discovered that in order for gpedit to add more templates to its library, all you have to do is place the .admx and the folder of the language you are using in C:\Windows\PolicyDefinitions. Apparently, once the files are in there, gpedit will add the new entries to its tree automatically the next time the program is started.
Despite doing this, my gpedit is not updating its library, no matter how many files I put in \PolicyDefinitions. All I want are the Device Installation options, but it seems that none of the new .admx files are showing up in the gpedit GUI. Anyone have a fix??? I am guessing that the stock gpedit that comes with Windows 7 Professional-Ultimate does not have this problem, but the bootlegged version of gpedit provided here does not seem to have this functionality.

Maybe someone here knows what I should do. All I really want in the end is to be able to edit my Device Installation settings so that I can disable the Windows 7 automatic driver installations. Alternatively, if any of you know how to do that without gpedit then that would also be great.

And I would rather not have to do a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate... Though I do I have that at my disposal.

[Amit]

Literally googled "disable the Windows 7 automatic driver installations" and got this (http://www.sevenforums.com/drivers/82054-turn-off-windows-7-automatic-driver-installation.html).

Turning off automatic driver installation isn't something you need Gpedit for. That's more for managing policies on mass-distributed/office computers.

[Cortexian]

Yeah you don't need Gpedit for this...

[Amit]

...which is why it isn't included in versions of Windows that aren't optimized for mass-deployment/office environment.

Hope that answers your question.

[RedBaron]

First of all, that simple fix doesn't work. I'm sure if you scrolled through the comments from pages that suggest that fix, you'll see that other users have come to this conclusion. Thanks for reminding me how to use google though, I guess...

Anyway, I already resolved this. I figured out that using "Windows Anytime Upgrade" from the start menu to upgrade from say, Windows 7 Home Premium x64 to Windows 7 Professional x64 does not require a fresh install. All I needed was a Windows key for whatever version I wanted to upgrade to, which I had. All of my existing programs and registries stayed unchanged, and doing this was basically like installing an update from Windows Updater. It didn't even require a boot into the installer OS; it just needed a restart.

EDIT: last 2 comments from the link you posted basically sums up why the fix doesn't work. And I don't know how (or rather where) to delete the pre-installed database of drivers that comes installed with Windows, but this doesn't matter anymore.

I admit though I was a bit brash jumping onto the shady version of gpedit. It turns out that the Windows Upgrade feature only compares what system files you don't have for the version you want and installs only those files. Since I installed the bootlegged files of gpedit before actually using the Upgrade feature, the bootlegged files were already on my computer and were not overwritten during the upgrade. In the end I was still stuck with a version of gpedit that wasn't able to add new .admx templates. At that point I just manually copied the 5 or so files that were affected from another Professional pc and placed them back onto my computer. All seems fine now.

And before anyone asks, virus scans were clean.

[Cortexian]

I'm pretty sure I followed that tutorial before and disabled them, because mine don't auto install and I never used Gpedit.

[Amit]

I followed the tutorial and plugged in my Joystick that I haven't used since I reinstalled Win7 and nothing happened, as expected. I know for a fact that Windows Vista/7 include offline drivers for the Joystick, so I'm not sure why the auto-install would still occur for people. Could be those people also tried mucking around with gpedit before doing the tutorial.