Make Windows 10 Stop Downloading, the Easy Way
If you want a really simple and easy way to get rid of the "Get Windows 10" icon and stop your PC from downloading Windows 10, you can download a little piece of freeware called
Never10, from well-respected security researcher Steve Gibson.
Download it, run it, and then click the "Disable Win10 Upgrade" button. If your system has already downloaded the Windows 10 update files, it will tell you, and you can click the "Remove Win10 Files" to delete them.
You’ll have to reboot, but at the end, the icon will be gone and your computer shouldn’t get the upgrade. And luckily, you can click those buttons again to put things back the way they were.
In the past, we’ve recommended an app called
GWX Control Panel–but Never10 is much simpler and more straightforward. You can still use GWX Control Panel if you if you want, but we recommend Never10. Check out
our full article on getting rid of the GWX icon for more information on both.
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Make Windows 10 Stop Downloading, the Manual Way
For most users, we recommend using Never10. It doesn’t require any installation, and it ensures you won’t get any updates. But if you’d like to know what hidden settings it’s tweaking behind the scenes, here’s a manual way to disable those updates.
There’s no magic button to click to stop Windows 10 from downloading–you’ll have to install a special patch from Microsoft to keep them from making you download something else. And that’s if you believe
Microsoft’s support documentation, which says that you can block the Windows 10 upgrade this way.
We haven’t been able to absolutely prove that this will stop Windows 10 from downloading because it’s hard to say that this is working just because Microsoft hasn’t forced us to download 3GB of files we didn’t ask for.
This is one of those instances where we normally would avoid writing on the topic, since too much is up in the air and we like to be accurate at all times. So please excuse us if this doesn’t work for you.
Step 1
You’ll need to install this patch from Microsoft’s website (from what we can tell you’ll need to be on Windows 8.1 and not 8 to install the patch), so pick the version for your OS, install it, and reboot.
Windows 7
Windows 8.1
Step 2
Open up your registry editor using the Start Menu search or by pressing WIN + R and typing
regedit and hitting enter, and then navigate down to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\
Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
You’ll probably have to create the WindowsUpdate key on the left-hand side, which you can do by right-clicking the Windows node. Click on that new key, and then create a new 32-bit DWORD called DisableOSUpgrade on the right-hand side, and give it a value of 1.
Don’t want to bother with all that? You can simply
download our registry hack file, unzip, and double-click on the file to install it.
And you should probably reboot after you do this. If you already have the $WINDOWS.~BT folder, which is hidden on the root of your system drive, you’re going to want to
follow these instructions over on AddictiveTips to remove it. We haven’t verified these instructions, as we already upgraded most of our computers to Windows 10, and we don’t have the folder on any of our test VMs.
Alternative Option: Set Windows Update to Not Download Things
If you set Windows Update to notify you but don’t download anything, Microsoft won’t automatically send the updates down.
Please note that this is a bad idea for security reasons, so unless you have a metered connection and don’t have the bandwidth to download updates, you probably shouldn’t do this.
You can simply go into Windows Update and click on Change settings, and then change the drop-down to "Check for updates but let me choose whether to download and install them".
If you do this, please make sure that you keep up with installing updates.
When You Do Want to Upgrade in the Future
The one side effect of going through all of this is that you won’t be able to upgrade to Windows 10 in the future until you remove that registry key.
Luckily you can simply use the uninstall registry key
provided in the download.
