You think you can turn them off. Temporarily. They mysteriously turn back on. For no obvious reason. I have literally never in my life been successful at actually permanently disabling Windows Updates. And god knows I have tried. The setting re-enables itself. The disabled service re-enables itself. Some installer quietly turns them back on. You change some unrelated setting and suddenly, there’s Windows Update again! There’s no escape.
Windows: “Oh, I know you already told me you didn’t want important updates, but I just assumed you still wanted critical updates? Okay, okay, I get it, you don’t want critical updates either, I hear you…” <3 weeks later> “I’ve been trying to warn you about this for the last 2 weeks but you’ve had your notifications turned off, but now I really have to because Microsoft told me this next update is SOOO important that I really need to install it just this once, okay! But really, you should have at least critical updates too. I mean, installing this update requires them anyway, and all the important updates too, so I’ll just turn those back on for you to make this whole process easier next time Microsoft has a super-critical-urgent-mega-feature-emergency-update for you, sorry for all this inconvenience!” <reboots in the middle of your work>
You think you can turn them off. Temporarily. They mysteriously turn back on. For no obvious reason. I have literally never in my life been successful at actually permanently disabling Windows Updates. And god knows I have tried. The setting re-enables itself. The disabled service re-enables itself. Some installer quietly turns them back on. You change some unrelated setting and suddenly, there’s Windows Update again! There’s no escape.
Windows: “Oh, I know you already told me you didn’t want important updates, but I just assumed you still wanted critical updates? Okay, okay, I get it, you don’t want critical updates either, I hear you…” <3 weeks later> “I’ve been trying to warn you about this for the last 2 weeks but you’ve had your notifications turned off, but now I really have to because Microsoft told me this next update is SOOO important that I really need to install it just this once, okay! But really, you should have at least critical updates too. I mean, installing this update requires them anyway, and all the important updates too, so I’ll just turn those back on for you to make this whole process easier next time Microsoft has a super-critical-urgent-mega-feature-emergency-update for you, sorry for all this inconvenience!” <reboots in the middle of your work>
Linux is the only solution that has worked.