How to disable Windows 11 updates

More and more people are updating their operating systems, either by buying new laptops or outright updating their existing devices to the latest Windows software. Windows 11 updates which Microsoft sends to your system regularly, are meant to keep your operating system up to date.

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They are, for the most part, a good thing but, occasionally, an update can go wrong, and so some prefer to postpone updates for a week or two to make sure that there aren’t any problems being delivered with the update. In addition, sometimes updates come at an inconvenient time — for example when you’re in the middle of a project with a tight deadline.

If you want to stop updates from happening for longer than that, there is a way to disable updates that worked — somewhat — with Windows 10 and should also work with Windows 11. However, even using Windows 10, this was not permanent; most sites reported that eventually (especially with a reboot), updates did resume. This may give you some breathing space, however.

• Use Win+R to open the Run box and type in services.msc. Hit OK.

• Scroll down to Windows Update and double-click on it.

• In the Startup type drop-down menu, select Disabled.

• Click Okay and restart your PC.

If you change your mind, you can follow these steps to re-enable it. You may note that you can choose Manual or Automatic. (Most Windows PCs come set to Manual, which simply means that the update is triggered by an event and doesn’t happen automatically when you reboot.)