Windows 10 - how to disable windows auto update, while using deepfreeze?

Question

We use deepfreeze, which is a software for cybercafe, public locations to allow the user to use the PC but on reboot it clean everything and goes back to our old stable setup.

Now that windows 10 finally arrived and using deepfreeze is making life complicated.

Windows 10 only allow to modify the windows updates in following options:

00000002 (Notify for download and notify for install)
00000003 (Auto download and notify for install)
00000004 (Auto download and schedule the install)

Now when i select 00000004 and let it install, after every reboot all the updates become a nightmare to handle and erase by deepfreeze.

How can we finally have the old method of disable windows update in 10 please? (we cant remove/stop using our decades of stable/reliable deepfreeze software)

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 06 '16 at 13:03

Your only real option to disable Windows Updates is through Group Policy but that's a huge IF, as you need the Professional Edition. Not all editions of Windows allows this. Also, there's a lot of security updates being sent out, so you're missing out on those.

If I'm not mistaken, Deep Freeze won't let you schedule updates which in our school district was a huge pain. We moved over to Drive Vaccine. We're able to schedule updates and it installs to the baseline (equivalent to the 'Frozen State') so you may want to look into that if handling updates is important to you.

score 2 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 13 '18 at 20:13

I have found a permanent solution for disabling all Windows updates forever regardless of whether the service or anything else is running. I have figured out this method with the help of many different sources that had to do with many different things. Overall, I found this method myself with the use of bits and pieces of other information used to do things that were not all related to this, but it works. And it works absolutely beautifully.

Install Acrylic DNS Proxy from here

It is basically a souped up version of the Windows hosts file that allows you to add wildcard names, which is necessary in our case because of the many sources Windows gets its updates from.
Follow the instructions here to make Acrylic start doing its job in Windows 10. Pretty simple stuff.
Go to your Start Menu, and click "Edit Acrylic Hosts File" under All Programs.

Add these lines to the bottom of the hosts file, with no # signs in front.

0.0.0.0 windowsupdate.microsoft.com
0.0.0.0 *.windowsupdate.microsoft.com
0.0.0.0 *.update.microsoft.com
0.0.0.0 windowsupdate.com
0.0.0.0 *.windowsupdate.com
0.0.0.0 download.windowsupdate.com
0.0.0.0 download.microsoft.com
0.0.0.0 *.download.windowsupdate.com
0.0.0.0 wustat.windows.com
0.0.0.0 ntservicepack.microsoft.com
0.0.0.0 stats.microsoft.com

Save and close the file.

Open Task Manager, go to Services tab, click "Open Services" at the bottom, select "Acrylic DNS Proxy" and click this button with the red circle to restart the service.

FINISHED

Now your Acrylic buddy should have your back and constantly keep an keen eye on Microsoft to make sure they can't force you to install updates.

Check to make sure it's working by pinging any one of the websites in the code above. Open cmd and type
```
ping windowsupdate.microsoft.com
```
If your results look like
```
Ping request could not find windowsupdate.microsoft.com. Please check the name and try again
```
you will be golden from now on!!

Note: in my experience, this has not slowed my PC at all. It also does not reroute any Internet traffic besides requests to the sources Windows uses to update or check for updates, so very similar to the hosts file. It also uses basically the same format as the hosts file. This has also successfully disabled the reinstall of junk that Windows keeps placing on my computer.

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 19 '21 at 07:41

1

Go to Date & time settings, and turn off set time automatically
Set the date to as far into the future as possible.
Go to Windows Update settings, then Advanced options and pause updates for as long as possible.
Go back to Date & time settings, and turn set time automatically back on.

Windows Update settings should now look something like this:

edited Jul 19 '21 at 07:41

ZygD

2,577

answered Jul 16 '21 at 20:22

nellapizza

111
1

Windows 10 - how to disable windows auto update, while using deepfreeze?

3 Answers3

Linked