Manually Override Power Settings in Windows 7 with a Group Policy in place

Solution 1:

Yes. In order to stop Group Policy from affecting your PC/laptop, you need to disable the Group Policy service. You will need Administrative rights on the PC/laptop.

Group policy is found in the registry here:

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\gpsvc

Change owners to your account (Permissions/Advanced/Owner) Make sure Administrators are checked to have "Full Control"

After closing that window, make sure the DWORD value for the Start key is set to 4 (to disable).

Reboot and Group Policies will not apply to your PC.

Note: - This will not work if you don't have full Administrative rights on your PC. - Your system admins may be clever and do other things to make life fun for you such as preventing from you accessing any domain resources if group policy does not apply to your PC (which is what we do).

Solution 2:

If you don't want to circumvent all policies, you could find the reg key associated with the policy, change the value to your desire and remove the system's permissions on the key. The domain would try to override the key but get denied as it wouldn't have permissions. Here is a good site that shows the location of the registry keys from a policy tree.