Fix “Some settings are managed by your organization”

I am currently part of the Windows Insider program, and I am always running the latest builds on my daily machine (yes, I understand the risks).   One of the items I continually run into for some reason, is that one of my machines seems to get stuck in a state where I get the error “Some settings are managed by your organization”.   Well..  this machine is not connected to my office at all, so this should just not be the case.    This seems to mostly cause problems when I try to get new builds via Windows Update.

You see this problem when you go to Settings \ Update & security \ Windows Update \ Advanced options.  This is where things getting greyed out, and the red alert shows up.  To fix this problem, here is what I did:

1. Navigate to:   Settings / Privacy / Feedback and Diagnostics
2. Change the drop down under Diagnostic and usage data for “Send your device data to Microsoft” to Full (Recommended)

If the drop down is greyed out and you see a red banner at the top that says “Some settings are managed by your organization”, do the following:

1. Navigate to:  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\DataCollection
2. Right click in an empty area and chooise: New -> DWORD 32bit Value
3. Call it AllowTelemetry and set the value to 3

Once I made that setting, I did not have to reboot, but just went back to the Windows Update screen, and was not only able to change my Insider status, but also was able to get the latest build when I did a Check for updates.

Add feature to Windows 8.1 without Windows Update

I ran into an issue today trying to add the .NET Framework 3.5 to a Windows 8.1 virtual machine that was running up on Azure.   Every time while trying to add this specific feature, I continually got the error message that Windows Update was unavailable.   So I had to try to find an alternate method to get it installed, here is the process that I went thru to get it up and running.

• Download or Upload the Windows 8.1 ISO to the virtual machine.
• Right click on the ISO, and select “Mount” (take note of what drive letter the ISO mounted to).
• Open an elevated command prompt.
• Enter the following command (change D: for whatever drive your ISO was mounted to):
  DISM /Online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:NetFx3 /All /LimitAccess /Source:D:\sources\sxs
• You should receive a message that the operations completed successfully.
• Enter the command:  shutdown /r /f /t 0 to reboot your virtual machine.