How to block forced updates to Windows 10 without borking your machine – Part 1

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Now up on InfoWorld, Woody on Windows.
[See the full post at: How to block forced updates to Windows 10 without borking your machine – Part 1]

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At first I thought this was about how to block upgrades to Windows 10, which reminds me that I had a dream last night that GWX Control Panel was telling me all sorts of bad things, including that I was powerless to stop what was happening. Congratulations, Microsoft, you’ve literally become a nightmare.

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The “Carboni” technique (thanks for the attribution, Woody), doesn’t necessarily involve Disabling the Windows Update service entirely.

The first step – one that anyone can do without disabling the Windows Update service – is to go into gpedit.msc and make one change:

Navigate to:

Computer Configuration
Administrative Templates
Windows Components
Windows Update

Find the entry for Configure Automatic Updates.

Set it to “Disabled”.

Note that this does NOT actually Disable the Windows Update service. There is terminology overlap here.

To be clear: Changing the policy stops the automatic installation of updates. It does NOT Disable the Windows Update service.

Please understand this distinction:

Setting the policy to “Disabled” is NOT the same as setting the Windows Update service to “Disabled”.

The former comes with no downside I can find, except the necessity to occasionally initiate the check for updates manually.

-Noel

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You’re right, I’m hung up on the terminology. Setting the entry “Configure Automatic Updates” to “Disabled” sure sounds to me like disabling automatic update – and it’s precariously close to disabling the Windows Update service.

I’ve looked all over. I find plenty of documentation about that group policy setting in Win7, 8 and 8.1. But I don’t see anything official for Win10. Have you seen anything?

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The closest thing to relevant documentation is what says in the description of each policy and the OS to which it applies. Most apply like in the previous OSes, some is new and others are newly confusing on purpose like the one which is described here.
What was wrong with the setting named ‘Never check for updates’?

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+1

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Just curious, but how is this different from setting the policy to “Enabled” and the configuration to “Notify to download and notify to install” in Windows 10?

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Very good question, and I’ll defer to the experts.

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Notify to download… means the scanning is already done for you at the scheduled times, only downloading of the bytes and installation are not performed automatically.
The option to disable the policy has the same effect with the previous Never check for updates, which means that all the work has to be done manually and svchost.exe does not use CPU cycles when it is otherwise scheduled to run.
It is a subtle difference, the end effect is similar though.

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Thanks!

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Thanks ch100 and Woody. Good info.

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