Automatic updates are pretty irritating, aren’t they? In Windows’ case, it doesn’t matter what you happen to be doing at the time- what programs you’re running, what tasks you’re trying to accomplish- if an update is scheduled, it’s gonna happen. And if it doesn’t happen, it’ll pester you repeatedly until it does.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply tell it to sod off? Never mind just telling it “later”- wouldn’t it be awesome if you could turn off automatic updates altogether, and only install Windows updates on your terms? Actually, you can. Here’s how:
Windows 7:
It’s actually a lot easier to turn off automatic updates on Windows 7 than it is on previous installments of the OS. All you need to do is click the start button, then type “windows update” into the search bar. Click on the application that pops up, and click on “Change settings.” Make sure you right click, and hit “run as administrator.” Click on “Change Settings” in the side-bar. From here, you can choose one of four options: Install Automatically, Download and Let Me Choose When To Install, Check for Updates, or Turn Automatic Updates Off.
Personally, I wouldn’t go with the last one- it’s better to just set it up so that you can choose when to download and install updates. Just make sure you don’t forget- Microsoft updates Windows for a reason.
Windows XP/2003:
You can do this one of three ways- You can either go through the control panel, or use the Windows Command Line. Again, I wouldn’t disable the service completely- just stop it when you’re working on something and you’d rather Windows didn’t nag you.
Option 1: Type ‘net stop “automatic updates”‘ into the command line. In order to to this, simply go Start-Run->CMD. Surprisingly simple, right?
Option 2: Navigate to the Windows Control Panel. From there, click “Administrative Tools,” then click on the “Services” tab. Go down to “Automatic Updates,” then right click and click “stop.”
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