Patch Lady – the tea leaves say a Feature update is coming

I’m an Earl Grey tea drinker, and lately the tea leaves … and well every tech site on the planet … is starting to give me vibes that the release of the Spring feature update for Windows 10 is right around the corner.  Now if you aren’t keen like me to update on day one, nor do you exactly want a feature update right before the United States Tax deadline of April 17th possibly impacting your Quickbooks or Turbo Tax, here’s some advice to push off that feature update to a point in time that you want it.

Now keep in mind that at some point in time I will strongly recommend that you upgrade to it…but just NOT on the first day, or week or even month it’s released.  There are new features in controlling telemetry, as well as more security goodness, but I’m just a cautious patcher and don’t install things on the day they come out.

The first step to push off this update is to evaluate if you are on the Home version or the Pro version. If you are on the Home version, unfortunately I’m going to urge you to click start, settings, system, scroll down to About, and check your version.  If Home, go grab your credit card as I’ll urge you to upgrade to Pro.  You can easily do this in the “About” section by clicking on the Change product key or upgrade your edition.  You should be able to click there and upgrade to pro.

Once you’ve done that you can then click on start, settings, update and security and then click on advanced.  Choose to be on the Current branch for business (if you are on an older Windows 10) or if you are on 1709 the wording will say Semi-Annual Channel.  Then choose to push off feature updates to 365 days.

I know what you are thinking.. “But Susan, we did this and they installed a feature update the last time I deferred it, so this setting didn’t work”.  I’m going to give Microsoft one last time to get this right.  This setting is *supposed* to work, and quite honestly should work, and believe me, I will be watching like a hawk to make sure they don’t have any mess ups this time.  For some people, breaking the trust of patching is making them do extreme things like changing permissions on folders to ensure this update doesn’t get installed.  Note that you can also set this deferral via group policy and registry if you need that in a network setting.

If you are stuck on Home, one trick Woody wrote about before that you can still do that we did before was to trick your Ethernet connection to think it was “metered”.  I’ll also keep an eye on Andre’s post about which computers are compatible with Windows 10 and those that might have issues.  I’ll be watching the forums to see if there are any trending issues.

And last, but certainly not least, I’d recommend that if you want 1709 and you haven’t upgraded to it at this time, take the time to download the iso and hang on to it.

If I see we need more draconian measures to push off the Spring update I’ll let you know but right now, I’m at “push off” level 1, ready to give the settings inside the operating system the chance to get it right this time.

I will however start blogging about some of the new features I am excited about.  More about that in upcoming blog posts.