Hi,
I am duel booting with Win7 & Win10, so I don't want to upgrade on my WIN 7.
I found this on a non-PC forum and it seemed fit the bill. Comments or clarification from peeps here that know what they are doing, as opposed to me a mere end user.
Step 1: take ownership of the GWX folder
Go to /Windows/System32/GWX. Right-click, Properties. Then, go to the Security tab, click Advanced. Under the Owner, click on Edit. Select your account rather than whatever crap Microsoft has preselected. Make sure you tick the box that says subfolders and whatnot. Apply the change. Ignore the warnings and prompts.
Step 2: change folder permissions
On the right tab, click Edit. Then, select your user. Change the permissions to Full Control, and apply. Then, rename the GWX folder to something like GWX.old. And just in case, inside this folder, you may also want to consider renaming the four executable files. Just use any which extension to cripple their executability. Problem solved. I simply deleted the GWX folder but if you’re not confident, rename it. It does the same thing.
Step 3: delete scheduled tasks
Fire up “Regedit” and navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Schedule\Taskcache\Tasks. What you’ll be faced with is a long list of CLSID entries. These appear to be random (but they’re not and the reason is long and complicated) and the data you want is in the right hand side pane. Go to the Edit menu and click “Find”, type “gwx” (without the quotes) and hit “Find Next”. The application will highlight the first entry, where you’ll see “GWX” under the key-value pair “Path”. On the left pane, locate the hive (folder) that this entry resides in (easy, it should already be highlighted) and export it (right click it) and then right-click delete it. There will by now be eleven entries. You’ll know you’ve got them all when you jump to a new section under .\\TaskCache\Tree\Microsoft\Windows\Setup. There you will be dropped into a hive with two entries: GWC and GWXTriggers. Export both of these and delete them. Launch Task Scheduler and make sure it runs with no errors.
Step 4: disable automatic Windows Update
Now you’ve killed GWX, you need to make sure Microsoft isn’t about to work around it and force a new kernel on you without your informed consent. Start the Windows Update tool from the control panel and check, it should now be disabled. If it isn’t, go into the settings and adjust to disable automatic updates. You can now either leave WU off and manually install updates after checking them for safety or leave WU altogether and risk missing an actual important update which may or may not contain a plug for yet another Microsoft security hole.
