Windows Update: Network policy settings prevent you

… from using this website to get updates for your computer.
If you believe you have received this message in error, please contact your system administrator.”

Network policy settings prevent you from using this website

This often happens on Corporate networks because your Corporate IT guys don’t want you to apply updates which they have not been approved.
As updates can break things.  (see tomorrow’s post for an example of a patch which breaks things).

But what if you’re the Corporate IT guy and you want to apply patches for testing?

You need to change two registry keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\WindowsUpdate
set DisableWindowsUpdateAccess to 0

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
set NoWindowsUpdate to 0

You can download a .reg file which does that here.

This post brought you by my frustration in having to find these registry keys every month, and my co-worker Ant, who recently asked “how do I disable the policy?”

Update: and if it still doesn’t work, have a read of Windows Update website – Error 0×80240025.

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