Does Group Policy Editor Windows update settings have priority over winutil's Windows update settings?

[bottleblue]

I used winutil to set Windows updates to Security (Recommended) settings. But I forgot I had tweaked some settings in Group Policy editor.

I enabled three settings in Group Policy for Windows updates:

Do not include drivers with Windows updates Select when Preview Builds and Feature Updates are received Select when Quality Updates are received

Do I need to reset the GP's Quality and Feature update settings to Not Configured in order to use winutil's settings? I don't want hardware drivers with my Windows updates no matter what.

Also the max delay period for Group Policy's feature updates is 365 days. How is winutil able to double that?

[ruxunderscore]

Maybe Chris would have a better idea, but here is what I understand about Group Policy. Group Policy is periodically applied to the Registry in Windows, so any changes made to values in Registry can be changed by Group Policy if the same entries are used.

Long story, short: Your GP changes will take precedence over "manual" registry changes. If GP makes changes to the same values, then you will need to remove your GP rules for changes made with WinUtil to take and stay in effect.

The reason why the max delay period for WinUtil is higher than GPs, just comes down to the way GP was built vs. the changes that WinUtil makes.

[bottleblue]

It seems like settings configured in GP would be more "secure", as in, they won't get reset or overwritten. If I accidentally changed the delay period in Windows update that would probably overwrite winutil's settings?

Although a 2 year delay period for the feature updates is extra convenient. Are feature updates really that unreliable that we need 2 years for Microsoft to patch things out?

However I'm using Windows 10 and it's going to be end of life by next year. So it probably won't get anymore feature updates anyways. I don't know, I guess I'll just stick with GP's settings.

[github-actions[bot]]

Closed due to inactivity