I haven’t run windows since 2019. However I need to boot my old drive to grab some data. I really need to make sure this system doesn’t update ant windows components, but I’ll need it to have internet access for a portion of the time.
On a different system, I used to have two reg keys that I would run to disable or enable updates when I found that disabling the services only worked until the watchdog would re enable them. Those resulted in updates saying something was wrong, which is perfect by me.
Now that web searches for stuff like this are all AI-gen’d SEO BS, can anyone tell me or point me to a reliable resource for truly disabling updates on Win 10?
PS - Bonus points if Anyone can link me to the page I used a few years back that had all sorts of privacy enhancing and telemetry disabling option on the left side and would create a reg file for applying those changes on the right. It might have been a purple theme, I forget.
I tried every suggested way of disabling Windows Updates, including changing dedicated settings in Windows Update, registry, group policy, disabling services, blocking it in firewall, adding WU domains to HOST file and some other tricks I can no longer remember - Windows just ignores it all and updates itself anyway.
The only thing that seems to have worked is to set your internet connection as metered and then set WU not to update over metered connections.