updates

Recently, we were working on a Windows 10 machine on a metered connection. Even though we are not fans of blocking updates, this time we had to stop the updates as they were sucking the data package dry. To do so we executed the commands of the block below in a command prompt with administrative rights.

To start a Command Prompt (cmd) with administrative rights we pressed Windows+X that showed the Quick Access menu, from the menu we clicked on Command Prompt (Admin). After that we got prompted by User Account Control window if it was OK to allow this application to make changes, where we clicked Yes.

In the new Command Prompt window we executed the following 3 commands that kill all services immediately related with the updates

net stop wuauserv
net stop bits
net stop dosvc

Explanation

• net stop wuauserv stops the Windows Update service.
• net stop bits stops the Background Intelligent Transfer Service service
• net stop dosvc stops the Delivery Optimization service

Revert action and Start Windows 10 updates

To resume (actually restart them since we stopped them) the Windows 10 updates you can either restart the machine or in a command prompt with administrative rights execute the following:

net start wuauserc
net start bits
net start dosvc