GPO settings to allow domain computer to use Windows Update from Internet

Question

I have a demo domain that I built and joined a Win 7 machine to. I would like the Win 7 machine to use windows update straight from Microsoft, not from the domain. However at the moment I am unable to use Windows update on that machine. It tells me the group policy settings prevent this.

Any hints on what change I need to make to the group policy so that the client machine can use windows update as if it were a stand alone computer?

I have full domain admin rights, it's just a demo/test domain.

Solution

If you installed WSUS, then it's probably what set the GPOs to point Window Update towards it. If you didn't install WSUS then there's nothing in the domain to answer Windows Update requests locally.

The Windows Update settings are located in Group Policies under:

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update

Keep in mind that if these policies have been set and applied to the clients, and you change them to "Not Configured" it won't remove the existing configurations from the clients.

Comments

[Joe Capka]

All the policies in that section were set to "Not Configured", so I don't think this is causing the issue. The specific problem is that I try starting Windows Update and I see a message "Some settings are managed by your systems administrator". I see this even when logged in as local admin. I have however not installed WSUS (as far as I know). This is a Win 7 machine from CloudShare based on their template so I am not 100% sure how they installed the OS, and I am trying to get it to play nice in my domain.

[Joe Capka]

I managed to get the updates to work, but not the way I was hoping. I specified the settings in the local policy and this caused the machine to download the updates itself at the specified time. Since it is a VM however, I was hoping to be able to do it manually as I need to using the Windows update interface, but this is just always grayed out. Thanks for the help in any case.