Request: Windows Update Features

[ghost]

First, congrats on going open source 👍

Anyway, one feature I'd really like to see is one I find particularly useful (and very under-used) which is to disable driver updates via Windows Update.
This is a useful feature because once you have your working system, you don't have to worry about driver updates coming along and breaking things - and you can do so without having to disable windows updates entirely (generally a bad idea for security reasons, and this is how people generally avoid driver updates - kinda overkill!)

The other very useful Windows update feature is to set it to only download them manually. You know how everyone is always saying how annoying it is that windows just forced an update on their PC? Well, it didn't. That's just the default, aimed at the general user who wants the thing to just work automatically.... they just never changed that default. You can have a button to download the updates whenever YOU want to do it :)

Here is the existing Windows Update section:

Here are the windows policies related to the above suggestions:

Note: Choose option 2!

While I'm at it, I'd request one more which can be useful for people who want to avoid unexpected performance impact: Disable "Allow automatic updates immediate installation". One example where this can be useful is for people who are say, playing a game, and don't want windows to do stuff in the background without asking.

Naturally, all of these options should come with the warning that they should only be applied by users who are willing to manually take responsibility for installation of upgrades/drivers/etc in a timely fashion, to ensure a secure and stable system, but since so many people complain that Microsoft has "forced" these automatic updates and "stolen" their ability to take this role upon themselves, when in fact the option has always been there, perhaps it would be nice to expose the option to power users who use software like Privatezilla :)

[ghost]

A quick screenshot of the "notify for download" option:

See? Windows doesn't force updates! It's just the default :)

[DrSaad77]

@xcasxcursex if you wish so much to disable this, you may do it with O&OShutup, this setting disable is present there......

[Belim]

Idon't know of any way to block Driver updates. All the other features you are used to, Privatezilla has already integrated for a long time

[ghost]

The Group Policy for blocking driver updates is in the screenshot pasted above. There are also some regkeys (some windows policies and some windows update settings) and all of the several methods I've seen, seem to work equally well, as though the option is a logical OR and any one of them being set will override the others. I could paste a few examples in here if you'd like?

How can I use privatezilla to set those other policies ('don't update automatically' and 'notify before download')?

[DrSaad77]

a bit simplier is to use Windows Update Blocker.
This way I can re-enable update once in a while easily...

[ghost]

That's not quite the same functionality as this. I can do all this with group policies now already, but it would be nice to put it in a nicer tool :)