Anyone else annoyed by the forced automatic updates on Windows 10? Me too! Sadly, some of the basic things like setting a group policy or disabling a service aren't quite enough to get it to stop. So, I wrote this application to try to get a better way to interrupt what Windows 10 Update is trying to do.
This is broken down into 4 parts: group policy, disabling services, blocking urls, and pausing updates.
If you have Windows 10 Home, you don't have access to the Group Policy Editor, but you can still set it via the registry. This application will make those updates for you, because who can remember where those settings are. This setting should be sufficient to block most automatic updates, but with some security updates, Microsoft will push those down regardless of these settings.
- Enable Automatic Updates: Allows updates to function as normal.
- Disable Automatic Updates: Disables automatic updates.
- Notify of Download and Installation: Provides notifications for download and install. Should function similar to older version of Windows that had this option.
- Automatic Download, Notify of Installation: Will automatically download updates, but provide notification before installation.
As a note, I'm not entirely sure that the Windows OS is listening to this anymore. I plan on looking into this an making updates to this at some point.
When in doubt, you can disable the Windows 10 services that run the updates. There are two that seem to control everything: Windows Update Service and Windows Module Installer. On your own, you can disable them and things will be ok, but Windows has a couple tasks that will turn those back on. Some are set at an interval, some are set at startup. There is also a third: Windows Update Medic Service. This is a new service that Microsoft uses to turn on all the Windows Update stuff. It looks like this came out with an Oct 2018 update, and as over version 2.0.0, support for disabling the Medic service is also supported.
You could try to disable those tasks, but I went another route. When disabling a service through this app, it also renames the underlying service file so that it's not possible to run the service. Previous versions of this changed the running credentials, but I could get whatever security access to the new Medic servie to change that, so I went the file route instead.
If you were running an older version of Wu10Man, don't worry, the new versions will still restore user settings as needed.
There are also a number of URLs that have been identified as being use by Windows Update. That list is included in the app config file so you can alter it if need be. You can set which URLs to block individually or as a group. This updates the hosts file at C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc.
A few months ago, Windows added a pause feature to some of the business license of Windows 10. Recently they added the ability to pause updates as well, but the UI only allows you to go out a few weeks. I added a screen that allows for a longer pause scenario. This isn't adding new functionality to Windows, only using the functionality that is built in. This feature will only work correctly on those versions of Windows that already support Pause/Defer.
This application does need administrative access as it is trying to write to the registry, alter services, and change the hosts file. As a result, some anti-virus software may also pick this up as potentially hostile.
There was a fair amount of research that went into this, but a couple sites stood out as references as I was writing this.