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colettelewis
Community Member

Windows 10 (again)

This morning I had an invasive pop-up from Microsoft telling me to update to, I think, this: 'Creators Update’ (effectively Windows 10.2) and telling me that the old Windows 10 (bad enough) would soon be extinct. The new version apparently has a lot of apps that are being forced onto users and other unpleasant surprises.

 

Has anyone else had this warning? And does anyone know if one can simply refuse this particular update despite the threats? Microsoft really is killing off Windows 7 now but it has taken about three years to do so, so I'm wondering if I can put this update off for a bit longer anyway.

30 REPLIES 30
moutcom
Community Member

Hi Nichola,

 

In Windows 10 there is no way to completely take off automatic updates. You can't prevent automatic updates, just get notified to schedule a reboot. Thus, upgrades, to postpone larger version jumps with time-consuming reinstallation of large parts of the operating system at a later date.

 

However with a workaround you should be able to avoid the automatic updates - but then also security-related patches. You should do this only in exceptional cases!

 

In the left pane at the bottom, under Services and Applications, select Services. Double-click on Windows Update in the list of services, and select the option Disabled for Startup type. Confirm with OK. After the next restart, updates will no longer be searched for download. You also won't be able to manually check for updates until you undo this setting.

 

Hope this helps.

 

--We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Mother Teresa
reinierb
Community Member


@Moutacim L wrote:

Hi Nichola,

 

In Windows 10 there is no way to completely take off automatic updates. You can't prevent automatic updates, just get notified to schedule a reboot. Thus, upgrades, to postpone larger version jumps with time-consuming reinstallation of large parts of the operating system at a later date.

 

However with a workaround you should be able to avoid the automatic updates - but then also security-related patches. You should do this only in exceptional cases!

 

In the left pane at the bottom, under Services and Applications, select Services. Double-click on Windows Update in the list of services, and select the option Disabled for Startup type. Confirm with OK. After the next restart, updates will no longer be searched for download. You also won't be able to manually check for updates until you undo this setting.

 

Hope this helps.

 

 

Eh, there is no workaround. The method you describe simply does not work.

 

How do I know this? 

 

I was spending up to 5 GB / month of data on Updates alone on a new Win 10 laptop. I've tried your solution and dozens of others I found on the web. Eventually, I contacted Microsoft Technical Support  to ask about ways to avoid Win 10 updates because of the high cost of data in my country.

 

Their response? 

 

"If you don't want the updates, don't use a Win 10 computer on the internet. There is no other way." 

 

So I don't. Instead, I bought two used Win 7 machines to use on the internet, since Win 7 was the last version ofWindows in which it is possible to disable automatic updates. My new Win 10 machine is now nothing but a glorified type writer. 

 

 


 

Reinier, you guys you have capped Internet? Like in the US? That sucks.

 

I use W10 only as a gaming console. For work, I use a true OS: macOS 🙂

(Troll, troll, troll)

-----------
"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless


@Rene K wrote:

Reinier, you guys you have capped Internet? Like in the US? That sucks.

 

I use W10 only as a gaming console. For work, I use a true OS: macOS 🙂

(Troll, troll, troll)


 We have both capped and uncapped internet, but the capped variety is too slow for anything but the occasional email. We should be on a par with Europe (bandwidth-wise) somewhere around 2097, or perhaps a bit after. 

 

I am beginning to lean towards getting a Mac, but I read somewhere that Apple controls their OS's more tightly than Microsoft does theirs. Is this true, or is this just a malicious rumour? Can you actually permanently disable automatic updates on a Mac?  


@Reinier B wrote:

I am beginning to lean towards getting a Mac, but I read somewhere that Apple controls their OS's more tightly than Microsoft does theirs. Is this true, or is this just a malicious rumour? Can you actually permanently disable automatic updates on a Mac?  


I'm not sure what you mean by controlling their OS, but macOS gives you the full latitude of operation. You can definitely not enable automatic updates (they are not enabled by default), but you really need to keep on security updates. That being said, they don't issue one every week, so I don't think it will eat your bandwidth.

 

The downside is: macs are crazy expensive.

 

Capped BW are really PITA.

-----------
"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless

Well Rainier, i dont know exactly what you tried and what your 5GB of voluime traffic was but it was not win updates !

The update is a service, and you can manually stop and start it.

If yoy cant stop it, that means some other process has taken ownership of this service and you must check for dependency --> in worth case its a virus.

 

If you want something else, try real unix flavour os/x or if you want to be independent use like me Linux.

--We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Mother Teresa

Moutacim,

 

To a certain extent, I can control (not stop) updates by setting the timer that sometimes (often) does not comply with my wishes. The message I got this a.m. was not for an ordinary (almost daily) update, but for a mega overhaul and it is scaring me to death. The last time this happened (2016 I think it was) it took me days to get up and running again - or up and limping again - and I lost important files.

 

Recently I needed to buy a laptop in a hurry and I was stupid and bought a laptop Win10 and now I wish I hadn't been so cheap. I should have replaced my old, dead Mac with one that would have been twice the price, but worth it.

 

ETA: The message told me it would take several hours to complete. I just hope Microsoft doesn't decide to do this to my laptop at the same time.

Yes definitely updates, if you scheduled or postponed them, are now heavier and win tries to give you the time to download and install them.

Well about windows, it's not that bad at all, it's just sometimes Microsoft with the politics just offends people to do what they want to do. And this sucks ...

But as a system, don't forget its stable, secure and its running ..... !

So one has to make decisions, and prepare the ground to avoid big surprises.

When ever you can tweak windows, use tricky tools to shut down services and so on, just do it.

Make sure you have two accounts, and NOT working with the admin account; just in case you can always rollback.

--We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Mother Teresa
gilbert-phyllis
Community Member

I recently submitted to the Creators' Update and it was relatively painless. (Unless the problems I am now experiencing with Outlook are caused by it. But I really don't have clear evidence of that yet. And I think I'm going to solve that problem by abandoning Outlook.)

 

I used to put off Windows updates sometimes. Last spring, Windows kept wanting to do a major update and I kept fending it off because I was busy and it wasn't convenient and I just didn't want to deal with it. That went on for weeks, maybe even a couple of months. Finally, I carved out some time and scheduled the update for an evening. The next morning, the whole system was hung and I could only power down, restart and let it try again. No success, finally did a system restore so I could get on with my day, and tried again that night with the same result. Contacted MS Support and much rigmarole ensued. I went through 2-3 tech support reps who couldn't solve the problem. (By this time, a week had gone by and I was losing productive time in 3-4 hour chunks.) Finally, my case was escalated a couple of levels to a support team who could actually help. That was the good news. The bad news was that the only way to resolve the situation was a clean install of Windows. It was a gigantic PITA because I use a lot of third party apps. 

 

In the end, Microsoft insisted that the root cause of the problem was my rejection of the big update. Who am I to argue? Everything has run fine since then, and I am now completely docile when it comes to accepting updates.

 

ETA: For me, the golden moment was when my 2nd generation Palm Pilot and my Windows laptop sync'd sweetly and harmoniously every day, and my flip phone was just a phone, no more and no less. I can't remember which version of Windows that was, but it's all gone downhill since then.

@ Phyllis,

 

So if it comes up again tomorrow - should I just go with the flow? It scares me - what am I likely to lose?

 

I haven't anything on at the moment, so I suppose I must accept meekly (sort of).


@Nichola L wrote:

@ Phyllis,

 

So if it comes up again tomorrow - should I just go with the flow? It scares me - what am I likely to lose?

 

I haven't anything on at the moment, so I suppose I must accept meekly (sort of).


I would say so, especially now that I've been beaten into submission by a Clean Install. It really is important to stay current on the security patches.

You can schedule the update for a time of day when it will be least disruptive to you. (MS is fairly good about letting us maintain some illusion of control.) I believe the popup window that you see will have some options about that. Also, if you go to the Control Panel to Windows Settings and click on Update & SEcurity, you can set your active hours, and Windows won't update during that time. You can also view your installed update history. 

 

I have not lost anything in an update except time, when the update got hung up for some reason. Also, if there is a morning when I have something that needs doing expeditiously, first thing--answer an email, check overnight survey results--that is the morning when my PC will wake up and say, Oh, not so fast, missy, we have to restart to finish installing an update! Because it will have run an update overnight but fallen asleep before restarting itself. So I have to go get another cup of coffee while it finishes. 

 

 


@Phyllis G wrote:

@Nichola L wrote:

@ Phyllis,

 

So if it comes up again tomorrow - should I just go with the flow? It scares me - what am I likely to lose?

 

I haven't anything on at the moment, so I suppose I must accept meekly (sort of).


I would say so, especially now that I've been beaten into submission by a Clean Install. It really is important to stay current on the security patches.

You can schedule the update for a time of day when it will be least disruptive to you. (MS is fairly good about letting us maintain some illusion of control.) I believe the popup window that you see will have some options about that. Also, if you go to the Control Panel to Windows Settings and click on Update & SEcurity, you can set your active hours, and Windows won't update during that time. You can also view your installed update history. 

 

I have not lost anything in an update except time, when the update got hung up for some reason. Also, if there is a morning when I have something that needs doing expeditiously, first thing--answer an email, check overnight survey results--that is the morning when my PC will wake up and say, Oh, not so fast, missy, we have to restart to finish installing an update! Because it will have run an update overnight but fallen asleep before restarting itself. So I have to go get another cup of coffee while it finishes. 

 

@Phyllis, you are indeed lucky that you did not lose anything important as the result of an update. In my case, every single update either broke something, or made something else work differently, or not at all. In fact, during the time my Win 10 machine was connected to the internet, I was forced to fully reset it three (!) times on different occasions just to get it working again.

 

Doing this can take a whole day, what with finding and reinstalling third party software, removing bloatware, and resetting defaults and preferences. Actually, the camera on my laptop is still broken from the last major update I accepted, and according to Microsoft, the only way to fix it is to reset the entire Windows installation again. 

 

So no, I am not at all enthusiastic about accepting any Win 10 update(s) from Microsoft.    


 

Thank you all - I am under the knife right now (backed up all my files last night just in case) - Microsoft says I can go using my PC, as  they "will be working in the background" - I'll be back when the anaesthetic has worn off. I just hope they don't mess around with my desktop shortcuts . . .

 

Reinier I hit the button before I read your last post - sweat pours from brow . . .


@Nichola L wrote:

Thank you all - I am under the knife right now (backed up all my files last night just in case) - Microsoft says I can go using my PC, as  they "will be working in the background" - I'll be back when the anaesthetic has worn off. I just hope they don't mess around with my desktop shortcuts . . .

 

Reinier I hit the button before I read your last post - sweat pours from brow . . .


 Let's just hope that the update goes well, and that nothing gets destroyed in the process.

 

However, you may want to create a recovery drive when this is done. In my case, I could not get the machine to boot after an update, and if it were not for my recovery drive, I would have had to spend big bucks at the local IT "specialist" to get my machine working again. 

I find Windows 10 to be a slight improvement over Windows Ebola (otherwise known as Windows 8). The only part of the Windows 10 update process that works flawlessly is the Critical Needs Detector. If I'm racing to get something done, I find that my keyboard stops working properly. The only way to fix that is shut down, disconnect all power, reconnect power, start.

 

That's when MS shows me the Working on Updates screen. If I'm lucky, I can get back to work within six hours. I've now learned that when my keyboard stops working correctly, I need to use the onscreen keyboard. As slow as that is, it is much faster than waiting for the Update to get installed.

Everything has been plain sailing until now. My PC is turned on but the screen has been blank for over an hour . . .

 

ETA: In fact I need advice on this. I haven't been watching my PC, because I've been working on my laptop. But I did see that it had got to the "updating stage" - the last stage - and it told me not to turn my PC off as it would shut down several times. So I left it. But If there were further messages I have missed them, and my PC is on, but has been showing this black screen for over an hour. I think I can turn the machine off an reboot, but this scares me. I HATE Microsoft.

Patience is not my strongest point, so I turned it off, and turned it on again. So then I get a message that they are trying to retrieve the installation - hold that - they are now restoring the old version . . .

 

Head hits wall>desk>wall - air turns blue.

 

ETA:  A whole day to install - operation aborted by me - but less than minutes to restore. Go figure . . .

 

Nichola, you know I love you; and I'm reinforcing that but...

 

"...it told me not to turn my PC off as it would shut down several times..."

 

"...I turned it off, and turned it on again..."

 

I well know that the black screen can be scary and sometimes seems to take an eternity to clear; especially to those of us who lack patience, but IMO next time don't turn it off.  Robot wink  

 

 


@Pat M wrote:

Nichola, you know I love you; and I'm reinforcing that but...

 

"...it told me not to turn my PC off as it would shut down several times..."

 

"...I turned it off, and turned it on again..."

 

I well know that the black screen can be scary and sometimes seems to take an eternity to clear; especially to those of us who lack patience, but IMO next time don't turn it off.  Robot wink

_________________________________

Lol - I know, I know! But over an hour . . . I might try again tomorrow, Smiley Embarassed


 

You guys scare me.  I have Windows 10, do the automatic updates, and have never had a problem.  Bad karma?  I certainly hope not!!

Yes Mary,

 

if you do it right, nothing happens to you -i should better say to your computer.

I don't want to offend or give a wrong picture, but the user is in most cases behind a bad outcome of update or upgrade.

I've seen a lot during my time with SUN, and believe me, you could get more scary if i told you how some sysadmins actually do a system update, and then run away and let others clean up the mess. And a mess in a production system is like 20K$ lost ... EVERY SINGLE DAY ! 

The discussions are endless; not working, tried the same but ..., working with xx since bla bla .. etc etc bla bla ..

 

TWO essential things to keep up -on so whatever system: OS/X, Unix flavour (AIX or Solaris) and of course Windows:

 

  1.  Close every program software - and i mean EVERYTHING (Mail client, browser, ccleaner, your nice desktop apps, etc.). You should see only necessary service in the task manager running. Also the wifi tool, if it's not build in MS !!
  2. And the second seems very inocent, but actually the problem itself on windows AND unix systems: clean your print queue/spool before even think to start the update or upgrade. On Solaris its even harder, you wont be able to do a rollback if something goes wrong. So clear the spool -no matter if you print to a physical printer or to file/pdf- get rid of the jobs, and shutdown the daemon !

So, if you do it like above, it can't go wrong .. MY WORD !!

 

Im sorry to say it again, if you mess up your system, unintended, then you should ask BEFORE doing anything. But after its easy to say nothing works, it's all sh...; dump computers etc etc .

I under stand also the fact that some of you had bad experience with customer service ... Most of cases those are fruits of recruitment among youngsters, with "oh again" attitude; A good technician makes your day happier, and explain to you why this happen and how to avoid it next time.

So you can do you upgrade if you pay attention to those little things ...

--We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Mother Teresa
reinierb
Community Member

@Moutacim, and where exactly does Microsoft share all, or any of these little pearls of wisdom with non-technologically minded ignoramusses like myself?  

@Reinier -- On a continuing basis, I definitely have a vague sense that I might have dodged an invisible bullet with each update and that I'm somehow living on borrowed time. I can't say with complete assurance that past updates have not disrupted anything. For someone with my limited understanding of how my PC uses resources and even more limited interest level in learning, it's impossible to determine when A is interfering with B or when B is interfering with A. I just want it all to work, dammit!

 

I recently invested in a new backup drive (I run differential backup every day and more complete backup once a week); and an inexpensive desktop so if the worst happens, I have someplace to restore to and keep going. (Twice, I've had to make an emergency laptop purchase in the middle of a major project. I don't intend to do that again.) The desktop is really a talisman to keep my laptop humming.

 

 

Well, I can't say I'm too disappointed at being returned to the old version, but I know I will have to update to Fall Creators soon, and I think "fall" might be the operative word. Perhaps they should have called it Fallen Creators - or why not just Lucifer and be done with it. 

 

Mary all I can say, is that when they do get round to "inviting" you to upgrade to this, it will take the entire day, so make sure you either don't have any work on or have another computer handy.

 

No doubt, I'll have to go through it all again probably tomorrow. I promise I won't rant until it's installed.

 

This is a totally unbiased, I'm gonna to write this again, unbiased, comparison between Mac and PC. It is totally impartial. Totally.

 

Any comments should be addressed to support@apple.com

 

-----------
"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless

@Nichola, the blank screen is not your fault. The update itself failed, and if you did not turn the computer off, the screen would have stayed blank until the cows came home.

 

Sadly though, for as long as your computer is connected to the internet, you can expect more of the same, but for what it's worth, I hate Microsoft much more than you do. 


@Reinier B wrote:

@Nichola, the blank screen is not your fault. The update itself failed, and if you did not turn the computer off, the screen would have stayed blank until the cows came home.

 


 

-----------
"Where darkness shines like dazzling light"   —William Ashbless

@Phyllis, I am with you regarding not knowing, and not caring how computers (PC's and laptops) work, even though I untangle several automotive control modules almost every day. However, I was perhaps lucky in the sense that since the Win 10 updates caused major disruptions on three seperate occasions, the damage was relatively easy to fix simply by reinstalling Windows each time, each reinstallation taking a day.

 

Now I don't connect my Win 10 machine to the internet at all. I've removed all removeable bloatware, shut down what could not be removed, and only use it as a typewriter. In this condition, everything works as it should except the camera, which requires another reinstallation of Win 10 to fix. Not likely to happen though...

moutcom
Community Member

@Rainier,

i agree with you that MS, or many other companies dont share, or share with limited acces or in user-un-friendly languange. But you may ask in a forum, ask in your area, -common you are tech type and a senior (!!), sure you know tech guys in IT field.

 

On the other hand i follow you reasoning: what is worth a) to sell computers and get paid for afterbusiness (support/parts/repais), or b) to sell computers without access to knowledge ?!!

 

Well, both i guess !

 

--We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful.
We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Mother Teresa

Nichola, regardless of how things shake out here's a big hug:

 

BIG HUG!!! Woman Wink

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