Prevent ExamDiff Pro from checking for updates at machine level

[nzdude]

Our users don't have admin rights to install anything themselves, so they won't be able to action any installs found under Check for updates. some of our users are behind a proxy server that denies them access to the internet for their admin accounts, so the check times out anyway.

As we regularly check the site for new versions and roll them out on our schedule, we'd like to untick Check for new version on startup for all users at install time, so that a user never sees the "Would you like to check whether an updated version of ExamDiff Pro is available".

Can you please advise how to do this for all users, not just per-user? If it's not built-in functionality, can you perhaps add this to the next beta?

If I untick the box, I see that the following key is set:

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\PrestoSoft\ExamDiff Pro\Settings]
"Check for updates"=dword:00000000

What would be ideal... ExamDiff Pro first checks for the existence of:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PrestoSoft\ExamDiff Pro\Settings]
"Check for updates"=dword:00000000

If that key (which users do not have write privileges to) is set to 0, then this disables updates, no matter what the user has set it to. Or, allow us to set a switch in on the installation command-line or in setup.inf to disable it.

Perhaps make this ExamDiff Pro-only functionality to further differentiate the two editions.

[psguru]

Trying to understand...

If you can change a user's HKLM key, why not change the corresponding (and already existing) HKCU key by an admin script? The result will be identical, and we wouldn't have to create a precedent of using an HKLM key.

[nzdude]

I am the admin. I have rights to both.

To change it for every user, we'd have to use group policy, run a script at every login or change the default user profile. I'm not saying you have to do anything in terms of creating keys yourself, but just change the behaviour of ExamDiff Pro to first check for the existence of a reg key in HKLM and if there(and set to 0), then disable the updates check functionality for all users.

Or let us put a settings.xml or .ini file in the C:\Program Files\ExamDiff Pro directory that it can read from .. doesn't matter how you do it, but it'd help us admins out if we could prevent update checking.

[psguru]

I went back to our support emails, and you did raise this issue before. Here's what you wrote in March, 2016: "We’ll just create a Configuration Manager Configuration item then to do this."

We are really not comfortable with adding one-off features for a specific user, and this request, unfortunately, feels like that.