There must be an easy way to disable Windows updates, no? For example, Fiddler 4 can be configured to reject all Internet accesses to certain domains. But Fiddler seems to be a resource hog, and I’d need a list of Microsoft’s update domains. So, if nobody has another answer, perhaps I’ll just suffer along with millions of others, letting Microsoft update itself and then wasting hours trying to undo the damage.
This morning I rebooted. I didn’t want to, but the Task Manager showed that “System” was up to almost a gigabyte of memory. (I strongly doubt that gigabyte was doing me any good; my guess is some of the programmers in Microsoft’s million-coder army were leaking memory.) Of course my laptop didn’t work properly after the reboot. It did work well enough to access Google and ask “How to fix …?” Details don’t matter except to note that
(a) the arcane repair is nothing a user could figure out by himself, and
(b) the instructions for repair did not come from Microsoft.
I’m sure someone will show up and say “Let your software update itself! It’s trying to do you favors!!” I don’t believe it. Most of the stuff that gets poked at my computer is more harmful than helpful. Anti-malware updates? I’m living with the Psycho-hijack, or whatever it’s called, and it’s benign compared with much of the crap I get. Some of the biggest problems I’ve had were caused by anti-Malware software itself. One of them even started killing all the .exe’s I was creating by compiling my own C code. :smack:
And cookies? I don’t know how many thousands of cookies are on my machine right now, but I’ll bet at least 99% do me more harm than good. Yes, some of them generously tailor ads for me but I don’t want ads that I’m more likely to click on — I often do click, and end up reading tripe.
I don’t disable Cookies — then I’d have to listen to more web-complaints “Please enable so you can enjoy our site!” Nor will I ever do a Clear All Cookies again — it then takes hours of effort before Google will figure out what language I prefer. (Hint it’s English/English/English/English/English/English/English/English/English/[del]English/English/English[/del]) where I’ve written “English” for each of the required cookies and “[del]English[/del]” for the language choices Google won’t ever let you set.)
This post starts with a question (GQ?) but becomes 99% rant and may belong in BBQ Pit. I’ve avoided cuss words and compromised with IMHO. I’ll close with one of my prior anti-Microsoft rants:
If you set your network connections to metered, Windows update won’t use them to download updates. It won’t affect the network connections themselves - it’s jut a flag.
Both of the Wifi connections I use are already set to Metered.
I should have Googled for the previous thread, where these “solutions” were mentioned and refuted. (That I didn’t is becuase the purpose of my thread was more to rant than to ask — although the Doper reaction that the problem is me, not Microsoft, serves as justification for the efficacy of my rant! )
In Professional you can set an organization policy to not download the updates. I did that, but discovered the microsoft bastards will harass you daily for tiny patches to Microsoft antivirus. You can disable your antivirus, but then they’ll harass you for that as well…
I just gave up and turned updates back on. But I can confirm that Windows 10 Professional lets you do this out of the box.
OP, if you are not running Professional or Ultimate, you will need to use a 3rd party program that is basically a hack. There will be no legitimate way to do this using normal tools in the OS itself.
I understand that Microsoft has no option to stop the updates, despite the claims in #2 and #4 (*).
But wouldn’t Fiddler, for example, block the updates automatically if I configured it to reset any access to Microsoft’s domains?
(* - It does seem odd that Microsoft offers not 1, but 2, ways to stop the update and yet continues to update anyway. I take this partly as a symptom of Microsoft’s bloated army. They don’t have platoons or even companies of coders, but many battalions or even brigades. The 7th Update Battalion just acts independently of the 4th Control Panel Brigade, and 2nd Internet Option Regiment! )
In general, if you find a way to block access to the OS for all Microsoft servers, sure.
First of all, I’m not even sure any program running on your PC is permitted access at that level if it is not running at a driver level. Fiddler seems to be for HTTP traffic and it may not be able to see the Windows Update traffic.
Second, how do you know they are using the Microsoft.com domain? They could readily call the domain something else, or have hundreds of domains, far too many to block.
Which doper is reacting to say the problem was you? All I see here is a thread with some responses that are trying to be helpful, but haven’t worked for you.
It depends on what version of Win10 you have. If you have Home, which most people do for their personal machines, you CANNOT block updates–you can only delay them by a week or so.
Setting metered connections is possible for either version - it’s not specifically a ‘block updates’ feature - it’s just supposed to help the OS make sensible decisions about the bandwidth it uses for its own purposes.
Noted that it doesn’t actually seem to have the desired effect any more, but that’s nothing to do with home vs pro.
Pro can be set not to update itself so that businesses can manage updates to the computers on their network in a way that suits them (i.e. via a WSUS server) - which is done for a number of reasons - including bandwidth on the outside pipe, and the need to test updates against business critical software before deploying to the whole business.
