Windows 11 updates, which Microsoft pushes to your system on a regular basis, are meant to keep your operating system up to date. They are, for the most part, a good thing. But as long-time Windows users know, sometimes an update can go wrong, so some prefer to put off updates for a week or two to make sure there is no problem with the update. Also, sometimes updates come at an inconvenient time, for example, when you’re in the middle of a project with a tight deadline.
You can’t stop updates completely, but you can pause them. There is also a way to disable updates, but it’s not permanent either. If you want to wait for potential technical issues or prefer to postpone them as long as possible, here’s how to adjust your settings.
PAUSE UPDATES
– Click the Start icon and select Settings
–
Open Windows Update – Open Windows Update to see if it is up to date.
If you have pending updates, you will find them at the top. You can also click the Check for updates button to see if you have any updates waiting. Otherwise, you will be informed that it is up to date.
Right below it, you will see the Pause Updates option. To the right, there is a button called Pause for 1 week that will allow you to do just that.
If you want to pause for more than a week, click that button again and you can extend the pause for up to three weeks.
If you want to restart updates, you’ll see that the button you used to check for updates now says Resume Updates. Click on that. You can pause updates for up to three weeks.
Unfortunately, unlike Windows 10, where you can pause updates for up to 35 days, in Windows 11, you only have up to those three weeks.
ADJUST RESET TIMES
Windows will usually have to restart to finish installing updates, and since an update can take your computer out of commission for a few minutes to a few hours, you may want to adjust your restart times for when it’s hotter. convenient.
– On the Windows Update screen, select Advanced Options
– Find Notify me when a restart is required to finish the update and turn it on. That way, you’ll know if a reboot is coming, and if you want, you can reschedule the reboot.
Right below that, click Active Hours. Find the dropdown menu to the right of Adjust Active Hours and select Manually or Automatically. If you choose the former, you can select the hours during which it won’t reboot (for example, if this is your work computer, you can choose not to reboot between 9am and 5pm). If you choose the latter, the system will restart when you are not using it.
DISABLE UPDATES
If you want to prevent updates from happening any longer, there is a way to disable updates that somehow worked with Windows 10 and should work with Windows 11 as well. However, even with Windows 10, this wasn’t permanent; most sites reported that eventually (especially with a reboot), the updates resumed. However, this can give you a break.
– Use Win+R to open the Run box and type services.msc . Click OK.
– Type “services.msc” in the “Run” box
– Scroll down to Windows Update and double-click it.
– Scroll down to “Windows Update”
– In the Startup type drop-down menu, select Disabled.
– Set “Windows Update” set to “Disabled” will stop updates, for a while
– Click OK and restart your PC.
If you change your mind, you can follow these steps to re-enable it. You may notice that you can choose Manual or Automatic. (Most Windows PCs come set to Manual, which simply means the update is triggered by an event and doesn’t happen automatically when you reboot.)