Frustrated with Windows 10 Updates--"My Phone" App

I'm running 1809 because of a lot of legacy hardware that stopped working when I allowed Windows to update.

3 years ago, I did the registry hack to disable Windows Update Medic, so Windows Update was "permanently" disabled and life was good until last month when it mysteriously enabled itself again.

The symptom was that the Your Phone app stopped working and tells me I need to update Windows, which means that somehow the app updated.

This happened last month and I went ahead an updated Windows, not realizing it would break all my legacy hardware functionality. It was a nightmare. I lost a whole week trying to get hardware working, to no avail, so I tried to load my last good working system image, but found that even that feature would not start up. I ended up doing system repair and that got me to the image restore menu and I was able to roll back to an October image and get my system functional again.

Then I immediately re applied the registry hack and disabled Windows Update. But 2 weeks later, My Phone app is not working again. I use it multiple times daily to access photos from my phone. It worked yesterday. Today, Microsoft did something to my system and reenabled Windows Update again and I'll bet the phone app updated and now is incompatible with 1809.

I tried to restore a backup image, but none of the start up options work anymore. I waited 30 minutes for the machine to come up in restore mode, but the monitor never woke up, so I powered down and rebooted again. I tried system restore, system repair, and even UEFI firmware, and all menus lead to a black screen and the monitor shutting down. Thus, I cannot restore my system nor get into the BIOS.

At this point, I just want to find a way to get the phone app working again. Or find an alternative app that will replace it. I'm so frustrated with Windows that I would switch to LINUX in a heartbeat if there were drivers support for my specialized hardware.

Of the options, the group policy looks the most sensible.

Yes, a lot of specialized peripherals that have had no driver updates since Windows 7. Some are running a beta Win 7 driver! But working just fine on 1809.

Simply reinstalling Your Phone from the MS Store results in the new, incompatible version being installed. I would like to get back the version that works with 1809.

I've tried a bunch of other replacements and none of them work, and some try to hit you with a $59 charge after installation completes. I really don't like the idea of having to plug in my phone every time I want to copy some photos. Prior to Your Phone app, I was wearing out the USB connector on my old phone to the point where it could not charge anymore. So wireless was a huge boon for me.

It's disturbing that there's no easy way to get into BIOS when the system is set for UEFI mode. I've tried pressing DEL key many times, but the system boots into Windows. On a forum, I learned that the way to get into firmware was through the shut down menu in Windows. But for some reason, that no longer works on this machine. On my old PC, simply putting the Windows CD in the CD drive and booting the system would put me in to system restore, but this system ignores all attempts entirely and boots to Windows.

The system is based upon Asus Z390P motherboard.

I've used Macrium on my newly built server, but I'm not particularly happy with the complicated process and easily making mistakes of not backing up the recovery partition, which happened to me already.

Just going to hint this

Checkout two programs called XBCD and X360ce.
XBCD-v3
x360ce.App-2.12.186

which usually comes wit h a tool ( bat ) to "Disable integrity checks and enable driver test signing"

...........

The problem is that Microsoft is charging venders of i/o devices $200 per year in order to allow their products drivers to be installed. This is why many older drivers are blocked.

Even if you was a programmer and tweaked the drivers to work for Windows 10 because they are not digitally signed they would
not be allowed run.

In fact windows will warn you when you use "home made drivers" that is not in it's lists of acceptable drivers. Usually people mocks/fakes a driver signature in order to be used and not have to ""Disable integrity checks and enable driver test signing"

"Disable integrity checks and enable driver test signing" is what you must do first. You could even use products from the Windows 98 era.

Again bugs could arise as those drivers are meant for ______ devices of _____ time. Again if you want to do something like
bypass official X-box 360 controllers for another game controller input you would need to "Disable integrity checks and enable driver test signing".

I think that is it. ???

Thanks for all the comments and responses.
So far, I've been unable to get into recovery mode to restore my last image where "your phone" worked.
I'd like to know more about this "store" that you mentioned that is updating the apps even when Windows Update is disabled.
If I could find a way to install the 1809 version of Your Phone app, that might be all I need.

As for Macrium, it's a lot more complicated than using Windows Image Backup. I only used it on my server because WIB wasn't working as it came from the vendor (with help from here, I eventually got it working and don't need Macrium any further).

I'm more than annoyed that MS is mucking with my system without my consent. This problem has cost me countless hours of lost productivity.

Understood about the driver signing. But that's not the whole problem. Hardware that worked okay under 1809 just malfunctions badly or doesn't work at all under the updated version.

Most of my workstation machines are offline and not connected to the internet, and they never give me any problems. But the machine I spend the most time on IS connected to the net. I'm thinking if I could block MS windows update servers at the router, that might solve my problem in the future.

I always used Windows Image backup to do the backups on my primary machine. It's saved me a multiple occasions when I screwed up something or had a bad software installation. The mode is accessed by shutting down Windows with the shift key and choosing advanced startup, then system image recovery.

I don't know why going into recovery bootup mode leaves the system with a black screen now. I can't see anything, so I can't proceed with the recovery.

Adding to my concern is that the option to boot to UEFI firmware also results in a black screen (monitor on standby), so I can't boot into the motherboard configuration either. All of these used to work in the past.

Pretty sure my drivers are all 32 bit, else they would not run in Windows 10 1809. For instance, my Wacom Intuos tablet. Running a beta driver they wrote for Win 7 64 bit. Works acceptably on 1809, but the tablet stops responding when Windows got updated.

It's unfortunate that I can't get back the old version of the phone app. Third party alternatives are useless and lack the functionality that I came to depend upon.