How to Block Windows 10 Creators Update | Hacker News Reader

How to Block Windows 10 Creators Update

tecklyfe.com

26 pointsmindfrost8266 comments

Remember when we used to come to tech forums to find the new updates, rather than learn how to avoid them? It just occurred to me that I literally camped out for some early OS updates. How things have changed.

I still feel excited about updates like that all the time with Linux.

Having used a distro that expose me to the sausage making, i am not.

One either have to rely on everything being updated in lockstep with everything else, or expect to do some massive backporting.

This because outside of a few projects, the kernel being one of them (Qt being another, oddly enough), nobody can be bothered to actually adhere to API, never mind ABI, stability beyond their own use for them.

I miss those days. You used to be able to deinstall windows updates, and other updates as well.

I would confidently install new updates, secure in the knowledge that if it broke something, I could roll it back. But Microsoft has so little faith in their updates that they know that they have to cram them down our throats.

Of course the narrative now is that everything must be "evergreen", so that they can find new ways to insert ads into our desktops, and deprecate features we depend on.

In fairness, uneducated update avoiders put themselves at risk and we all suffer the consequences. I think enforced updates are fine on Home systems. They're a piss-take on Pro though.

I don't buy that anymore. In theory, it makes sense, but, the idea that it is ok to force users to update has been used to justify so much crap.

Just off the top of my head, I've seen so many "home users" get burned.

My grandmother's copy of Skype on her PPC OSX Leopard stopped working, so I had to nullroute ui.skype.com, and revert the update with Time Machine, and it started working again. When they said it was a "critical" update, they were lying. It worked just fine when I reverted it and disabled the updater. The update was purely there to deny service, and remove all functionality.

Or my grandfather's Kindle updated itself to disable encryption. Don't even get me started on the "helpful" updates for the Kindle. My grandparents recognized it for the scam it is.

And I'm pretty sure that "transparently" installing updates is not for convenience, it's because if you explicitly told users what you were doing, a lot of them would want to say no. If you simply had a dialog box detailing exactly what the update had just done, people would not be happy. So instead, your software landscape is just one where stuff shifts around and disappears at night, and you have to pray that the next update won't break something.

If there was a "security patches only" option in there, somewhat akin to a LTS distro option, i think there would be less complaining.

That said, it is hard to find a good time to do updates, and not everyone notice that popup about "we are about to reboot for an update" while in the proverbial zone.

I mean up until recently the fervor over OSX updates was ridiculous. I understand that people want to not be bothered by updates, but not updating is the reason that we have so many security holes.

The description of what an update contains is often dishonest. They don't mention the features they remove, even in small print.

Also, they are highly deceptive in how they push them on us.

Finally, my computer is important to me, and I can't afford to be their beta tester. My computer isn't a toy.

The problem is that there is very little way to opt out of new/changed features.

People hold up on doing updates because they do not know what will break, and they need the computer to work 24/7 these days to stay in contact not just with work but also with family and friends.

I can't think of the last time something I was doing was broken by a Windows update.

Maybe not you or me personally, but MS has all too often pushed out updates that blow up on various computers.

And it is not only the major updates.

I have a laptop here, built around AMD parts.

when AMD introduced their Crimson driver set, they also discontinued support for the APU part of this laptop.

But still MS tries to be helpful and push out updated driver files, completely ignorant of the issue.

Thus at random intervals i can expect my external monitor to stop working until i go into the device manager and roll back the driver for the APU.

Edit: bah, scratch the part about "and me" up there. Thinking back i had to grab some tool at one point and actually blacklist a patch from MS because it would attempt to install, reboot, fail to come up a few times, then roll back, reboot, come back up, and then try to install again a day or two later.

The last two major updates have hosed a few things for me, which is why I'm deferring from now on.

As a Linux user, I've ignored all news of this update until I saw this headline. Why might one want to block this particular update?

I've used it, and I'm not sure either. The author of this also doesn't seem to know why:

> I’ve been using the Windows 10 Creators Update for a few months now through the Insider Preview program, and I haven’t had any major issues.

Sounds like this is just baseless W10 hate.

I think it's the vestige of a time when people were in control of the software running on their computer. Their interest in blocking the update is directly proportional to the difficulty in doing so.

I think it's healthy to oppose certain mandates in principle even if the particular mandate is good. If we lose the ability or knowledge to stop an update, we have lost some freedom.

It's not too hard to imagine MS getting hacked and a truly malicious update being pushed.

The hate you speak of is the hate for the principle of losing control, not hate for MS itself.

Or people that don't like some company treating the computer as their own (Yay, paternalistic protection from ourselves!). Or people that don't want to update to an OS version that pushes ads into basic utilities. Windows 10 is 95% great, which makes the 5% of shit in the crevices stand out even more.

I saw some people complaining about a game (it might have been GTA V) crashing repeatedly with the update, so there is (or was) at one reason for someone to want to block it.

Seems to be running rampant in this thread.

Consumers: The Anniversary Update reset every personalised option in Settings, including if you opted out of some of the telemetry.

Businesses: Rolling out updates is a huge process.

Too many machines grab the update together, and the network can slow to a crawl.

You don't want to update during peak hours, which could be at night.

Some GPOs inevitably fail, so you want to test first, deploy later.

Some drivers inevitably get replaced by non-functional MS ones, something you test for.

None of this used to be a problem until MS decided that sysadmins aren't trustworthy, and shouldn't be able to tell the system that they are. No sudo and responsibility.

But they arent trustworthy. To be trustworthy one must understand the system one is admining. MS now plays so many cloak and dagger games that no sysadmin has any real idea what is happening. They cannont be trusted to understand a system so poorly documented, so hidden behind secrecy walls.

Not to mention that MS assumes the only companies with competent sysadmins are companies running Enterprise.

Windows 10 Pro is a slightly-less handicapped version of Home. To call your product Pro and prohibit users from turning off the Store and all its ads for games is bullshit.

Far from only MS, sadly. This attitude is spreading its tentacles all over the FOSS world as well.

That's not true, the Ann. Update reset some specific settings for some users due to a bug (now patched).

Umm... Windows 10 Enterprise is exempt from the autoupdate isn't it?

The last major update snuck in an unannounced thing where you could no longer disable the lock screen. Someone might be wary of updates in general because of things like that.

On Android it happens very regularly that an app gets worse in some way with an update. I've long since turned off automatic updates and only update an app if I have a specific need to.

Ditto. The apps I have were chosen because they already work the way I want. Changing it will (likely as not) make it unsuitable for my purposes.

It will insert ads for OneDrive in the explorer.

While I agree that those are awful, at least the ads are easily disabled: https://betanews.com/2017/03/08/disable-ads-file-explorer-wi...

This must be a law of program settings: The one you want to change is always under "Advanced".

I think it's great, probably just fear of instability or the usual spyware concern. Very pleased with the Nightlight feature which doesn't have the performance implications of f.lux. I like Windows 10 and WSL enough that I gave up on desktop Linux.

Why would anyone want to block the update? I updated mine without any hassle. Took only about 10 minutes or less to finish installing. I had to reconfigure my custom context menu and explorer shortcuts though.

I just got a giant warning popup from Parallels (virtualization software) on MacOS that I need to update Parallels before upgrading any Windows guest OSs to Windows 10 Creator's Update. The update claims to fix an issue where Windows won't boot after updating. So, maybe one would want to block the update for reasons such as this? Not sure...it was easy enough for me to stop and update Parallels first, but maybe others have reasons for not doing so.

My usual reason for delaying is major deadlines where I can't (won't) take the risk of this update botching my machine.

> I updated mine without any hassle.

> I had to reconfigure my custom context menu and explorer shortcuts though

Maybe this is why

Well, this is easy to do using WinAero[1] software and I didn't really think of it as a "hassle".

[1] http://winaero.com/comment.php?comment.news.1836

I had to do zero work and didn't need to download any software when I didn't update.

Because Windows updates break things sometimes?

Also they have been known to reset a shit load of settings and apps (did it to me, twice).

I'm happy with the update. I grabbed it the moment it was released and haven't had any issues.

I will say that the Creator's Update definitely still has some rough edges. Users will be better off waiting a month or two to upgrade to it.

> How To Block Windows 10 Creators Update on Professional or Enterprise

Just use WSUS you silly goose.

I formatted my device so I could get the update earlier. Why would anyone using windows NOT want the update?

Surely "Creators Update" should have an apostrophe in it somewhere?

It should really be called the "Creators' Update". My guess is either Microsoft's marketing people don't like apostrophes or someone at Microsoft doesn't want creators to get the idea that they have ownership of the update.

Maybe it's a call to arms? "Creators! Update!"

Or maybe it's just a bug... ;)

Or a statement of fact. "Users use. Creators update."

It should, but I've even seen Microsoft official PR statements put it as a plural instead.

It really should just be officially called Windows 10.3; Threshold 1/1507/RTM being 10.0, Threshold 2/1511/November Update being 10.1, Redstone 1/1607/Anniversary Update being 10.2, Redstone 2/1703/Creator's Update being 10.3.

They've also created new rules for grammar.

> Go to KB 3073930 and download Microsoft’s Wushowhide tool. (Click the link marked “Download the ‘Show or hide updates’ troubleshooter package now.”) Double-click on Wushowhide.diagcab to run it. Click the link marked Advanced. Uncheck the box marked “Apply repairs automatically.” Click Next. Wushowhide will run for a long time.

Windows is so user friendly ;-)

I migrated my windows app to Wine+Linux and never looked back.

Yeah, I've never understood why ticking boxes in hidden subsections of myriad mysterious configuration apps was generally regarded to be more user friendly than changing a parameter in a text file.

It is about feature discovery. One can poke around the GUI and see what is possible or one can read the manual about options. I suppose the typical user prefers to poke around. Of course for the power users changing a text file is the way to go.

It really sucks when the option isn't in a GUI or a text file though, as is the case here.

Ah I see. There are two issues here: making a configuration option hidden or accessible and making the change interface GUI or text based. I only commented on the second aspect. Depending on one's point of view making a configuration option hidden is either keeping users from shooting themselves in the foot or denying users freedom to control their own machines the way they see fit.

Sometimes configuration is spread across different GUI apps, or just poorly organized within a single app. The equivalent is a problem with text configuration, too of course.

What I think of is things like msconfig.exe, a fairly obscure program that controls a lot of useful and diverse features for Windows, but I didn't even know about it until I'd been a window user for years as for some reason it wasn't included in the control panel until recently.

Nice troll

Wine+Linux stack has better compatibility with many older Windows apps than Windows 10.

Why would you want to do this? Other than bugginess, but that's always there with Windows 10. Is there anything new that's bad?

Some people want to do this precisely because it's hard to do. And getting harder with every update.

What's bad is losing control of the software running on one's system, not necessarily the content of the update itself.

I think it's the addition of adverts in explorer, although from my understanding, they are completely optional [1].

[1] https://betanews.com/2017/04/10/disable-ads-windows-10-creat...

There are advertisements everywhere in Windows 10 already: the start menu, the lock screen, the notification centre. That's just another brick in the wall.

I haven't updated to Creators Update, but I see no advertisements in any of those places (or anywhere else, actually).

I did turn off "Get fun facts, tips, and more from Windows and Cortana on your lock screen".

There's also a ton of garbage pinned on the start menu by default (which I've also removed), but I'm not really sure it qualifies as 'advertising'.

The "Windows Spotlight" lockscreen option occasionally displays ads (they're the "more" in "fun facts, tips, and more", apparently). The start menu frequently showed suggested apps for me to download from the store, until I disabled all the live tiles. The notification area told me to use Edge every time I started up another browser (disabled those notifications too).

These are all forms of advertising couched as "helpful tips", with the goal of encouraging me to use products that I'm not already using.

The only place I have seen them pop up so far is in the lock screen. Maybe I've seen more, but just overlooked them.

The lock screen ads only show when you use the daily Bing images. You can either set your own lock screen image, or click "I don't like this image" and keep doing that every time an ad image shows.

You don't have start menu items for Get Office and Candy Crush?

Also, I believe some of the pre-installed bloatware have ads (Money, Food, Weather, and maybe others).

It depends on where you live I think. The start menu by default looks like Broadway, full of colourful ads. The notification centre shows ads for Office 365 and OneDrive sometimes.

Are you asking why people don't want a potentially buggy update?

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