How to remove Windows 10 upgrade updates in Windows 7 and 8

Wow UsernameIssues

You do all that and still have time to post here and possibly on other forums is amazing. It is hard enough for me to maintaining three operating systems on one computer. Now, with the extra work trying to avoid certain windows 10 updates on my windows 7 partition by avoiding certain updates it is becoming a pain in the neck. I still installed some of those updates that I felt comfortable with.

Even though I use 10, I am still uncomfortable with windows 10 because of some concerns. Otherwise, I would gone to just dual booting windows 10 & Lubuntu

It is a crazy hobby at times

Most of "my users" are elderly. Fortunately, they don't all call me at once.

I have W10 in a VM. W10 has no features that I need/want.

michael diemer said:

Everybody who does not want W10 should download the GWX Control Panel. Make sure you disable the "upgrade OS" setting. And then change your Win Update settings to "never look for updates." Then once a month run Win Update, looking only for Important updates, and "other Microsoft products" (if you have them). Use the lists here on this forum to check the updates. Basically, install only security updates. Doing this has kept W10 off three computers, including one where they sneaked the full 5.9GB file onto it. GWX Control Panel deleted this file in minutes. Please do this!

Out of sheer desperation, I have taken your advice and installed GWX Control Panel from Major Geeks and have checked 'Disable OS upgrades' But I'd be a bit uncomfortable setting Windows Update to never check for updates :-/ So I will leave Windows Update set to check for updates but let me decide whether to install them and see how that goes. Hopefully, if GWX does its job, I will not get any more Windows 10 KB numbers installed.

Oner question though, with GWX set to disable OS upgrades, will Windows Update still offer me Windows 10 KB numbers and do I still have to carefully scan all the KB numbers offered, to hide them and try to prevent them being installed? Or does GWX automatically hide or prevent those KB numbers from being installed (until such time as I uncheck Disable OS upgrades?

You can be reasonably sure of security updates, I would think. On my computer, with the settings I described, that's pretty much all that Update will find. Aside from the Malicious SW Removal Tool, there was only one update that was not security-related, and that checked out OK. I avoid outlook updates as I don't use that, and there have been problems with those lately. If Office updates are found, I install those. On one computer I have Libre Office, so I don't need MS Office updates.

I would thoroughly read the manual for the GWX Control Panel. It says that it does stop the Telemetry updates. If you want the strongest level of safety, put it on monitoring mode. I just run it once a day, I figure that's enough.

michael diemer said:

I would thoroughly read the manual for the GWX Control Panel. It says that it does stop the Telemetry updates. If you want the strongest level of safety, put it on monitoring mode. I just run it once a day, I figure that's enough.

OK. I downloaded the GWX Control Panel from Major Geeks. But I didn't realise that it was the standalone version until a few minutes ago, when I visited the author's page, Ultimate Outsider and saw there were two versions: the standalone one and the installer one. But since the standalone version can be run in monitoring mode, I can see no reason to change to the installer version.... And I have read and saved the 10 pages of instructions as a webpage for future reference!

This is what the author says it will do, which answers my question about whether I still need to manually look for and de-select Windows 10 KB numbers before I install Windows Updates
GWX Control Panel is a free program that you can use to do the following on Windows 7 and Windows 8:
Remove the "Get Windows 10" icon that appears in your notification area.
Prevent your Windows Update control panel from upgrading your computer to Windows 10.
Prevent your computer from secretly downloading Windows 10 installation files.
Detect and remove the hidden Windows 10 installation files if they're already on your PC.
Optionally monitor your computer for unwanted Windows 10-related settings and files. (New in version 1.6.)

As for the user manual,