Michael D. Ober said:
Welcome to M$ marketing. Vista Home <any version> doesn't have the code
and utilities turned on to connect to a Windows domain. Thus, tools like
GPEdit (Group Policy Edit) don't exist for them, even though they may have
uses in non-domain environments. This is why I recommend Vista Ultimate
to people who ask me which version of Vista to get.
In XP Pro, I had the ability to edit group policies but not the ability to
apply them, or at least the documentation I read said that I had to be in a
domain to use group policies. So Vista is not different in that manner.
In a G4 cable television show, they explained how to set the registry to
hide drives. The setting is a group policy setting. Perhaps they just did
not know that the setting could be modified easier using group policies, but
I think the main reason they did not know is because most of their viewers
were not in a domain and therefore could not use (apply) the group policies
normally. I wrote the following to automate what was described in the G4
show.
Hide Your Drives Sample
http://simplesamples.info/Scripts/HideDrives.php
Also, someone wrote a utility that does something with group policies but I
cannot remember whether it edited them or applied them and I can't find the
utility now. It cost about $10.