Another way to prevent W10 from upgrading

[doriel]

Yesterday, I went to my friend to play Rocket League with USB gaming controllers. We started to play, and after approx 10 minutes, in the bottom right corner, “Windows is not activated” appeared.
I asked hom why he has this error there and he told me, that this prevents his PC against automatic updates 🙂 So this is the way how stop updates, because error appears when he tries to update his PC 😀

Dell Latitude E6530, Intel Core i5 @ 2.6 GHz, 4GB RAM, W10 1809 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

[anonymous]

This is only true for older versions of Windows. In Windows 7, you’ll still get security updates even if Windows isn’t activated—just no “quality” updates of any kind. In Windows 10, as far as I can tell, this is no longer the case: unactivated Windows are eligible for all updates, even feature upgrades, with no restrictions. The only restrictions I’ve ever noticed for unactivated Windows 10 is the inability to customize the PC, like changing the accent colour, desktop background, or even setting the taskbar to auto-hide itself. In fact, Microsoft even allowed unactivated copies of Windows 7 and 8 to upgrade to Windows 10—though they’d still wind up with unactivated Windows 10 on the other end.

Source: https://www.howtogeek.com/244678/you-dont-need-a-product-key-to-install-and-use-windows-10/ and from personal experience

[doriel]

Thank you for your post and interesting reading.
I didnt go too deep in his PC, but I know what I saw. If he checked for updates in control panel, there was some error. Cant remember exactly which one. Maybe there is some other problem with his computer – he is using this ugly unlicensed Windows copy – who knows how many terrible things he has done to his PC. But he is still 1703 Home and he wont go any further. He achieved his goal by doing it wrong. Interesting.
This is the fun forum and I find his solution very amusing.

Dell Latitude E6530, Intel Core i5 @ 2.6 GHz, 4GB RAM, W10 1809 Enterprise

HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29

[anonymous]

I had a Windows 10 machine that hadn’t been updated since 1703, also running Home. Trying to install updates resulted in an error. However, that copy of Windows was activated, so it wasn’t caused by the activation. Probably because his copy was so old and out of date that Windows Update would no longer work on it.

I did successfully upgrade that machine to 1909 by using a mounted ISO file though, so there’s a way out. Fingers crossed.

1 user thanked author for this post.

doriel

[Author]

Posts