System Policy Editor is a graphical tool provided with

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...

Windows NT 4.0 Windows NT 4.0 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 3.51, which was released to manufacturing on July 31, 1996, and then to retail ...

, and

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. The second operating system in the 9x line, it is the successor to Windows 95, and was released to ...

. System policies are made up from a set of registry entries that control the computer resources available to a user or group of users. These registry entries can be applied to individual users, groups of users, or to anybody logging on to a particular computer. It works by manipulating

Registry Registry may refer to: Computing * Container registry, an operating-system-level virtualization registry * Domain name registry, a database of top-level internet domain names * Local Internet registry * Metadata registry, information system for re ...

and security settings. User-specific settings are stored in the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry hive. Likewise, machine-specific settings are written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. ADM files are template files that are used by System Policy Editor to describe where registry-based policy settings are stored in the registry. They also describe the user interface presented to System Policy administrators. In

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was officiall ...

, the System Policy Editor was replaced with the

Group Policy Group Policy is a feature of the Microsoft Windows NT family of operating systems (including Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2003+) that controls the working environment of user accounts and computer accounts. G ...

snap-in for

Microsoft Management Console Microsoft Management Console (MMC) is a component of Microsoft Windows that provides system administrators and advanced users an interface for configuring and monitoring the system. It was first introduced in 1998 with the Option Pack for Window ...

(MMC).

References

Windows administration Discontinued Microsoft software {{Microsoft-software-stub