Microsoft removes manual deferrals from Windows Update 'to prevent confusion'

I&#x27;m a tolerant person, but I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter&#x27;s birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doing updates instead. It seems like Windows has become an update engine that will sometimes also do computation for you.<p>My assumption is there&#x27;s someone at Microsoft who gets a bonus as long as they keep presenting update graphs going up and to the right, and they don&#x27;t care how much they mess up the user experience in the process. Microsoft should reassign that person.

&gt; Microsoft has been continually tweaking the way the Windows 10 updating process works based on &quot;user feedback&quot;<p>I... what... where... when?<p>Seriously, how about just giving control to users? And btw, I still see machines were the telemetry service eats CPU. If you cannot get it to work, remove it. It shouldn&#x27;t be part of an OS anyway. Don&#x27;t tell me users like it, you could just offer an app in that case.<p>I don&#x27;t get how neglected they have treated their flagship for desktop computers. Software as a service is good for my tax declaration, but I really hate this trend.

Before Windows 10 I would just disable the Windows Update service and enable it on my own schedule when I wanted to do updates. I&#x27;ve had my machines stay undisruptive for months on end, sometimes up to a year without rebooting, and the reboots would be initiated by me (hardware changes, power outages, or updates that I actually wanted to install.)<p>Since Windows 10, Microsoft has caught onto this and added a new service that checks if you disabled the Windows Update service and re-enables it automatically, and sets permissions that initially deny you from tampering with it that then makes this a little more challenging to get around, but still possible to do manually. I later found Windows Update Blocker (WUB) which does all of this for you in one click. I have been using it ever since, and have never again been nagged by any update or experienced an unexpected reboot: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sordum.org&#x2F;9470&#x2F;windows-update-blocker-v1-5&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sordum.org&#x2F;9470&#x2F;windows-update-blocker-v1-5&#x2F;</a>

If it didn&#x27;t require a reboot, an automatic update wouldn&#x27;t bother me at all. I hate that my one remaining Windows machine is never in the same state I left it because it rebooted during the night.

I finally got pissed off enough at the forced update policy that I made a tool to disable updates for real: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wheybags&#x2F;win10bsfixer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;wheybags&#x2F;win10bsfixer</a><p>It works by killing and disabling the windows update service every 10 seconds, so it should be resilient to pretty much any aggressive changes ms makes. It does allow manually updating when you want to too. I want to have it handle some other nasty behaviours too eventually, but its enough for me to use for now.

As an outsider (someone who doesn&#x27;t use any MS products) looking in... why would anyone build a production system around this platform? Why would anyone use this platform?<p>Windows 10 has, since it&#x27;s inception, been a privacy nightmare, which simply does not respect the user or administrator. There might be some hacks to let you turn some of these behaviors off, but it seems like they aren&#x27;t likely to survive an OS update.<p>I just cannot imagine owning a business and being OK with some other company having control over whether or not I am permitted to use my computer systems to get work done today.

There are a lot of comments on this thread which ignore one important point. Windows updates are totally centrally controllable to an enterprise user. They can be made silent, and force rebooting can be incredibly rare. On the other hand I get lots of calls about mac problems which are caused by not updating! That is not really the Unix stability that people argue for, is it? We answer Mac calls with a &#x27;have you tried updating, then turn it off and on again&#x27;

Too many users were using options to hit the &#x27;defer updates for 365 days&#x27; button.<p>Microsoft can&#x27;t let them do that (&quot;...Star Fox!&quot;), they NEED the newest features, security updates, and telemetry.<p>Cynical: The stupid users don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s good for em, that&#x27;s for MS to decide now, not the users.<p>However, there is an opt out via GPO for now. Of course if that gets used enough it will be ignored.<p>&quot;If you wish to continue leveraging deferrals, you can use local Group Policy (Computer Configuration &gt; Administrative Templates &gt; Windows Components &gt; Windows Update &gt; Windows Update for Business &gt; Select when Preview builds and Feature Updates are received or Select when Quality Updates are received).&quot;

Want us to be more tolerant of updates? Set things up with much better support for shutting programs down cleanly and ideally restarting them as they were. Add a Windows message that says &quot;shut down for restart&quot; and don&#x27;t do a forced restart until every program has honored it. (Obviously, older programs won&#x27;t support it.)

I&#x27;m trying to see the benevolent aspect of these major updates that happen every 6 months, but I don&#x27;t see it. Do they have to be so frequent? Do they have to be so massive (several GB downloads)?<p>And yet, 5 years after RTM, Windows 10 still has two control panels and an overall inconsistent UI and plenty of bugs. The whole OS is like a permanent work in progress.

All these never ending stories with Windows Update in W10 is like walking around the problem that is caused by lack of proper QA team that was pushed onto users and removal of previously perfectly working feature of selective updates installing - which was obviously great because in case of problems user could just skip the bugged patch and wait till a fixed version is released. The old way of delivering patches in Vista&#x2F;7 style should return - even by a price of patches &quot;weight&quot;.<p>I get it: they want people to stay up-to-date to avoid problems of zombie-machines but Windows isn&#x27;t OSX that works on narrow set of hardware and software configurations - these differ much (duh) and that affects how updates work. Expecting that users will ditch their workflow to report all issues on forums (or these will come from the &quot;<i>enthusiasts</i>&quot; testing grounds), will want to play countless reinstallations, backups and restoring is just wrong. This leads powerusers who want to have more control over their machines to disable (temporarily or permanently) WU along with associated processes which by the way, seem behave in a very malicious way.

I am honstely surprised that businesses and other organisations have come to accept this constant 24&#x2F;7 &quot;updates&quot; scenario from Microsoft without some intelligent business people calling them out on it.<p>Imagine if every month, every week, or even every day someone from an office supply company came around to your office and collected all your pens, pencils and other office supplies and replaced them with &quot;updated&quot; versions. Meanwhile you could detect no meaningful difference from the &quot;old&quot; ones. After a while, you would just tell them to go away: &quot;The supplies I have are working just fine. Thanks.&quot;

A happy Ubuntu users here for the last 15 years, I guess I don&#x27;t really understand what Microsoft is messing around anymore and I&#x27;m just glad that I do not need Microsoft at all for so long.

If you <i>must</i> run Windows 10 I strongly recommend the Enterprise LTSB (Long-Term Servicing Branch) version. You have much more control and can strip out most of the garbage.<p>I&#x27;ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to get a single copy of Enterprise LTSB. Hint: windows 10 enterprise ltsb gen2

What pisses me off is that a windows machinea spend so much time downloading and installing the OS and just a few Microsoft apps.<p>Linux machines update everything including hundreds of apps you may have installed (and some are updated very often) and you barely notice it happening because it&#x27;s so damn efficient.

I genuinely don&#x27;t understand why people buy the &quot;New Microsoft&quot; marketing line. They are adopting Linux because they have no other option. Where they&#x27;re strong, the desktop, they&#x27;re still the same old Microsoft.

This is just going to cause technically-inclined people to configure their networks to MITM all calls to the Windows update servers and block updates network-wide.

WINOS &gt;&gt; a work in progress since the 1980&#x27;s WINDEVS &gt;&gt; don&#x27;t touch what is working unless your boss told you to do so. WINUSERS &gt;&gt; don&#x27;t update unless your boss tells you to do so if you have no boss don&#x27;t update. REALITY &gt;&gt; you need two computers which can do the same work if one goes down.

I’m done and out. One too many turd to deal with.

To all of you shouting complaints into the ether in the hope of gaining karma: this change only affects Windows 10 Enterprise.

Please note that the feature to defer still exists and can be found in Group Policy.

And of course it&#x27;s still possible to opt-out with some &quot;pro&quot; version?<p>I mean, there are always situations where you want to avoid to be interrupted by updates by all mean...<p>Oh wait, I get it... pro versions are called Arch, Gentoo, etc... ;)

Makes sense. I clicked it accidentally out of habit because it looked like an optional download button for an update.

Would it be difficult to just patch the binary that controls updating to just go back to the previous behavior?

Microsoft is reducing confusion. They don&#x27;t want you confused into thinking it&#x27;s your software or your computer...

It does prevent confusion! It prevents confusion about who Microsoft thinks owns my computer once I install their OS.

How &quot;helpful&quot;.