Opening the Local Group Policy Editor
When it comes to configuring Windows 10, some things are easier than others. For example, setting up and activating a wireless connection is easy with the taskbar notification area and the Settings app. But did you know you could prevent all users of a computer from accessing a CD-ROM drive? You can, and the Local Group Policy Editor is a way to do it. The first thing you should know is that the Local Group Policy Editor is only available in the Professional and Enterprise versions of Windows 10. So before you try the steps below, check to make sure you have one of these and not the Home version. If you’re good to go, use one of the below methods to open the Local Group Policy Editor.
What Is the Local Group Policy Editor?
The Local Group Policy Editor allows you to set configurations for a Windows 10 machine. Now, Windows has lots of tools that enable you to do this, so where does this one fit? One way to think of it is in terms of ease of use. For example, the Settings app is arguably the most accessible Windows configurator, with its large text and targeted options. But you’ve probably been in a situation where you can’t find what you want in Settings, and need to open up Control Panel, one step up in both functionality and complexity. A very functional (and therefore complex) tool is the Registry Editor, which requires you to find cryptic key names and change values manually. The Local Group Policy Editor sits between Control Panel and the Registry Editor on this scale. You can do things here that you can’t in Control Panel, such as applying system-wide changes and removing options from built-in applications such as File Explorer. You can make changes like this in Registry Editor as well, but the difference is that Local Group Policy Editor gives you nice graphical controls for the options it supports.
So What Can You Do With the Local Group Policy Editor?
To list all the capabilities available through Local Group Policy Editor is beyond this article’s scope, or really, any single piece. But you can explore the options here, and we’ll walk through one example of its use to demonstrate how to use it.
