How to stop Windows Update download ?

I am using temporarily a mobile broadband service which is very expensive, and is charged by downloads. Unfortunately, this will last for the next 4 months.

So I went in and set Windows to "Never search for updates" or some such effect.

To my horror, it does not seem to work. Every time I log on, it would start downloading a whole heap of data, like Tens of MB in just a few minutes. I looked at the Network Activities on Task Manage ( Advanced Resource Monitor), and notice this download comes from IP address 8.254.26.254, I matched its PID and found a number of processes have the same ID, one of them is Windows Update. The image of the process is svchosts.exe(svcnts).

Am I barking up the right tree, that it is Windows Update still doing its job? Or could it be something else that I am not aware of. I set up the options for my Firefox, Adobe etc. to stop updating, and even disabled their service in "msconfig".

So if anyone else knows how do I kill or stop this download?

Thanks

You can go to Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Windows Update\Change settings and choose the way that you want to download or not download them.

You Should only Stop Automatic download. Choose option let me selectwich updates to install and download. it will help because some updates are necessary and there are driver updates as well.

FWIW, IP address 8.254.26.254 doesn't appear to correlate to anything Microsoft.

That IP address goes to CNET. You probably have some other software or utility that is updating. Choose what you download and install from CNET very carefully. Microsoft has never used outside servers that I know of.

Update: It appears to be a proxy server and used by many "questionable" sites. A root kit and malware scan might be a good idea.

thanks for all your hlps ...