I'm a Mac user, so I'm used to the OS respecting me, but as I sometimes need to build and debug Windows stuff, I do have a VM with Windows 10. I use it maybe on

I'm a Mac user, so I'm used to the OS respecting me, but as I sometimes need to build and debug Windows stuff, I do have a VM with Windows 10. I use it maybe once a month, sometimes rarer. Every time I ran the VM, there inevitably were new updates. These forced updates pissed me off enough to figure out how to turn the update system off altogether. If anyone's interested, here's how it works. There are several services related to Windows Update. Some of them have their state controls in services.msc greyed out so you presumably can't stop them. But if you leave just one of them on, it'll reactivate the rest of them and guess what, you're getting annoyed again. So you have to look for all services that have the word "update" in their name or description, and set their state to "disabled" directly in the registry, then reboot. I did this more than a year ago, and haven't had a single update prompt ever since. You should probably also disable everything related to telemetry while you're at it. And uninstall the Windows Store, it's useless anyway.