Enable or Disable Windows Update Automatic Updates in Windows 10  

mmortal03 said:

Did something change in the Fall Creators update? I always disable the service after getting updates, but today I noticed that the Windows Update service had become re-enabled all by itself on all of my machines.

That also sometimes happened with older versions of Windows 10 as well. Maybe an update they added to all versions to make it re enable?

Brink said:

Yeah, it's not uncommon for some updates to reset some settings back to default.

I think it's different this time. It seems to be re-enabling the explicitly disabled Windows Update service on me, even when coming out of Hibernation.

mmortal03 said:

I think it's different this time. It seems to be re-enabling the explicitly disabled Windows Update service on me, even when coming out of Hibernation.

Actually, now it's re-enabling the service without even restarting or hibernating. There must be some new scheduled task restarting it from a recent update?

Edit: Yep, I see four scheduled tasks under WindowsUpdate: Automatic App Update, Scheduled Start, sih, and sihboot. I don't know what was there before and what I'd already disabled, but they were all enabled after just checking. I've disabled them and will see what happens now.

They will definitely become enabled again unless the 'WindowsUpdate' folder has been deleted.

Matthew Wai said:

They will definitely become enabled again unless the 'WindowsUpdate' folder has been deleted.

Yeah, they re-enabled themselves. I wonder if I can just export Automatic App Update, Scheduled Start, and sih (for if I ever want to bring them back) and then just delete those three, leaving sihboot and the folder alone.

I have just done what you wondered. Let's see what will happen.

Matthew Wai said:

I have just done what you wondered. Let's see what will happen.

I tried it, and it looks like it re-creates them. Microsoft is being pretty obnoxious about this.

At my end, it has re-created only Scheduled Start and does not check for updates anymore.
Just my VBScript still checks for updates every day.

That's what it did initially for me, too, but once I left it alone for a while, all of them came back. I may just have to end up deleting the whole folder. I read somewhere that sihboot might be necessary at some point, but I'm not sure if that's true or not.