Yes, you can. I hate Windows and its eagerness to update whenever, but that behaviour is configurable.

In the Windows Update settings, under Advanced options, disable "⏩ Get me up to date" then set your "Active hours" to "Manually" then set an 18 hour block that doesn't conflict with your work day, like 6 am till midnight. At least in theory, you'll only get updates applied when you deliberately reboot or leave your machine on overnight.

Edit: if you're really keen, you can use a tool like O&O ShutUp10 (it works on 11, too), or edit the registry to completely disable auto updates.

Not a sure thing, though, and IT policy often disables those options.

Linux users in their natural habitat, obscure online forums.

Observe how they nitpick minor technicalities between themselves, a hallmark sign of affection among their kind.

I just use Mint and call it a day tbh

Your IT dept. has to be pretty shit if they're controlling those policies but not setting basic work hours. Turning off that restart asap crap is the norm, because management/c-suite get pissed off by random restarts and immediately blame IT.

The niceness cancels it out

And then spend an hour trying to get the presentation to run the way you made it. I love Linux, but installing Linux here in this time sensitive situation is definitely not the move for someone who has Windows already installed and their presentation completed and saved, presumably because they don't know enough about Linux to confidently switch over completely. Some will probably be able to get out of that situation unscathed, but not most.

no. you can't.

it's set in policy on enterprise installs and you have to reghack to get it to stop.

that's not it working, that's a hack.

wow, spoken like someone who is clueless about how enterprise solutions work.

I thought you might just be inexperienced, but now I can see you're just an armchair idiot.

No, where I work we use macs. Everyone has a Mac and our policys prohibit windows as a work os

The user-facing options only allow you to delay updates for up to a month. There is no way to permanently disable automatic updates from there.
If you are a power user, there are ways that use things like group policy, registry keys, etc.
But you may not have access to those if you are on a work or school computer, as that is managed by your IT team.

I have a laptop and a PC with the same settings. The laptop forces updates, the PC doesn't and I have no idea why.

Yeah enterprise images are set to default as 8am active time. If someone leaves their machine on they'll switch to an inactive state at like 8pm or whatever you configured, and do the updates at like 2am and you should never need to know anything about it if something doesn't break.

Not every setup is done well though, ive have several coworkers and I have Mac OS and Windows images want to force a reboot during work hours, 99% of the time it is either the user never allows the machine to be on when it isn't in use, or IT dropped the ball on the image.

macOS is practically a BSD though (XNU is a modified Mach microkernel with a BSD layer bolted on top of it)

I'm no vibecoder but between 2024 and now, LLMs also got much better. It might not have been the money that changed his mind.

What a strange response. You've said that deferring updates can't be done on Windows. It's plain factually incorrect. You're literally quoting that policy can control it but saying it can't be controlled, but you see no contradiction. Real enterprise uses WSUS, which absolutely can defer updates, it's one of the main selling points.

Not everyone uses that, and group policy is sufficient for plenty of orgs. The link in my earlier comment clearly explains how policy and registry settings can avoid OP's problem, so "no you can't" alone, is a ridiculous and incorrect response. That there exist cases where enterprise makes it more difficult does not mean that it is not possible. It's arguably easier with enterprise because IT can push those settings out to everyone and make sure no one has those interruptions.

Hence the qualifier:

At least in theory

Aw dude

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/14/linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits/

Just remember to say thanks to Meta when you boot from now on.

Aw dude

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/14/linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits/

LLMs either hit a wall or got worse, so no.

It's your mistake, never schedule a presentation after a patch Tuesday

(I'm joking, fuck this shit, Wednesday I had to fight all the computers "OMG a new update it's out, can I reboot now????")

I don't think they were genuinely expecting the person to install Linux instead of waiting for an update to finish

Modern macOS has diverged significantly from its bsd origins.

Interesting. I’ve used Mac for years and for the last 2 or 3, macOS has really gone downhill. What line of work are you in that bans windows? The entire point of windows is enterprise management, which macOS is famously bad at.

No, he said AI may be used for assistance in kernel commits, but the same code quality and comprehensibility as before AI is required.

He cares about the output, not it you got some code snippet from ai or stackoverflow.

"I'm afraid I can't let you do that"

We work in health data, but we also done have enterprise management.

When a review was done about 6 years ago, windows was a big risk in how we work

Seriously, this right here is why I stopped using windows for work and switched to linux for professional reasons. Windows is not serious business software because of shit like this.

I only have it in the VM but even there I tried all kinds of things like hacks in the registry and all kinds of services disabled only to discover sometime later that it tried to update.

I just set it read only so that it just can't do that now, anymore. It's such a virus...

And yet, they would still be more likely to pull off the presentation in Linux if it’s literally not possible in Windows 😉

As much as I'd like that to be true, this is unfortunately not the case...

Problem is you need a live USB stick...

That's a "yes, but", not a "no".

ease yourself into linux with ubuntu which has an install for most of the same software as windows uses and when youre ready you can go full FOSS on a deeper linux os.

no need to suffer like this.

Windows updates whether you want it to or not. whether you have auto-update on or not.

This isnt new with windows 11.

I almost got stuck in an airport because windows 10 decided to update, despite being in standby, in my laptop bag like 10 years ago.

4...

I use to have this and other sounds from 2001 as system sounds.

And AI code is intrinsically bad because is fundamentally impossible to understand (yeah, I mean literally). You just can understand what you actually put your effort to comprehend, reason and write by yourself. They're just delegating their reasoning to a machine.

Also, Why not LLMs?

69

You're going to argue that some new never before seen trove of uncontaminated training data was discovered? Perhaps you think the AI Scaling Laws don't exist? Businesses that adopted AI dropped it or went out of business not long after, it's as useless today as it was in the 1980s.

OP is getting fucked alright.

I recently got a job which required I use a work computer, which uses Windows and every ms service, some of us do have to suffer like this...

No, I'm arguing that the models got better. I unfortunately have to work with them...

Pure fantasy, mate. The only thing these machines have proven effective at is psychosis.

I should do that, that sounds fun

how it go

Remember this day when you purchase your next computer.

Because windows ever informed me of anything like that instead of using dark patterns to force things on me without any elaboration. And windows is full of stuff like this whilist providing the users much much less control than linux. I've been conditioned to expect no settings for things I want on windows and the settings that are actually there to be overwriten by windows at any time without again, informing me in any way or caring about my consent. Not to mention that the settings UX is a big mess on windows and are a PITA to use.

In what fantasy world are you living, that you don't believe that??

I'm living in the world of software engineering and this is a fucking reality now... I don't like it. I really don't like it. I really would like to agree with you, but it's not the case, since they have introduced reinforcement learning a while ago, the models got quite a bit better, this has nothing to do with AI psychosis or anything.

They are not superior for everything (fortunately, otherwise I would have to fear about my job), and I say that as a quite experienced software engineer, but for rather dull tasks they are certainly quite a little bit faster than manually programming per hand, although it's certainly more fun to program by hand even dull tasks...

Hell, this is why I went out of my way to make sure I could control updates for my personal machine where the only consequences of it doing a random update would be that I can't use it until it's done. I didn't even ever have it actually do an annoying update because the frustration was obvious as soon as I heard the term "automatic updates", like this isn't just for some program, it's for the OS itself and will demand restarts.

And that isn't even mentioning the undesirable updates, like the buggy ones or the ones that just enshitify your OS rather than add anything anyone wants, like all those windows 7 "get ready for windows 10" ones and apparently some people even got an automatic "7 to 10" update.

And then on Linux, every part of updating is nicer, other than the supply chain attacks (which is unfortunately serious enough I could see it threatening the entire Linux ecosystem itself).