Umm…gates? Never heard that term.
Once you’re on Win10 you can’t really roll back, though, can you?
No going back - but you could do a complete image backup using Macrium Reflect personal before you upgrade
Would have to reinstall everything… could be worth it in the long run though. Big project. I’d blast the drive and start fresh I guess.
Did I miss something? Why don’t you deactivate the updates in Win10? Its obviously not as easy as on Win 8.1 but it’s possible. I made it on my computer which is connected to the internet quite often when I’m at home and it don’t do any updates.
The issue is that Windows Home forces the updates on you unless you say you have a metered connection. I even had a case where my laptop had not been connected to the internet for a week before a gig, and just as I started to sound check Windows decided that was the time to do a major update that took two hours. Fortunately I had a spare…
The good news is you can update to WIN 10 Pro license for a fairly low cost if you go to one of the bulk resellers on the internet. I just got a WIN10 Pro license for £20 and applied it to my old Gig laptop. It worked fine, so will now do it to my DAW PC.
Once on WIN10 PRO you can get back to deciding when you update.
I find WIN10 as good as WIN7 in terms of stability, even the blocky/flat look and feel (looks like it was drawn by a five year old) is growing on me.
Regarding the argument of staying on WIN7, that is fine if you have a nice stable system and all your hardware and software is supported. The problem then is as that as time moves on you may lose things like driver support for legacy OS, vendors may stop officially supporting the older OS, etc. So there comes a time when you may need to migrate. I went with WIN10 on all of my machines for consistency. My big regret is going for the free home version update, but as mentioned above there is a low cost way to get to PRO.
Although I wouldn’t suggest it… you can disable the Windows Update Service.
Press the Window key to bring up the Search Window. Type “Computer Management” without the quotes. Select Services and Applications from the left panel, and then select Services. Scroll down to “Windows Update.” Right click and select Properties. Click the Stop Button, and then change the pull down to Disabled. Click Apply.
I actually run a VB Script that disables about 10 services during “playtime.” When I have everything running happy, I use Macrium Reflect to image my system. Then when I have a little “down time,” I run the script to turn everything back on, run any updates and virus checks, and run a couple of tests to ensure everything is happy. Then I run the script again, make another image, and I feel safe.
Rick
Agreed that at a low level you can disable it, and that was maybe what FantomXR was referring to?
I’d be interested in hearing a little more on how your VB script works and what you have found is safe to disable.
Yes. In my experience disabling the update-service is not sufficient, because for what ever reason Windows still does updates. I followed up the guidelines in this link:
and that one (German only):
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“The last update of win10 opens all “gates” again and you have to close it step by step to maintain a clean system for music applications.”
OK, I’m a dummy. What’s this mean?
I take to mean the “Microsoft knows best” arrogance which means that your finely tuned system settings are wiped out by an upgrade…
It’s like centralized government! In OS form! I’m an operating system Libertarian. 
(Which should really mean I use Unix I suppose…)
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It’s why my main computer is OS X. Much more pleasant than Windoze! Rock solid and far less frequent updates that you choose to apply when you want to.
I’ve kept my music PCs windows based as a cheaper platform, I need to keep at least one a PC for my Java librarian testing and some of my VSTs are WIN only. But I now have all of my PCs on WIN10 PRO, so I can now control the update cycle better, but even so, I may follow some of the tricks mentioned above.
FYI, here is where I got the WIN10 pro licenses from for £20
https://softwaregeeks.co.uk/
https://softwaregeeks.co.uk/product/windows-10-pro/
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Derek,
If I can figure out how to share a file, I’ll post my script. It’s a “simple” VBScript and a comma delimited text file listing the services and their displayed names. You can choose to (1) show the service state, (2) enable the services, or (3) disable the services. It uses IE to display the progress. The most complex part is the class to display IE.
Rick.
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One major reason some of us are running Win 10 is because the new CPUs won’t run older versions at all. I purchased Win 10 Pro for my current rig and have disabled the update service. It hasn’t tried to do any updates since disabling it but I get an error message after updating virus definitions in Defender. It still updates the definitions and works properly though.
Some people have said that somehow their disabled Windows update service enables itself at random times but I haven’t had that happen here yet.
I also did a full system backup when Windows was first installed and I do regular backups now using Macrium Reflect.
My main Cantabile PC updated itself earlier this week and lots of things just stopped working: I could no longer get midi in from any device, my external Tascam sound card stopped producing sound etc etc etc. Took me 3 full nights to get everything working again - had to resort to reinstalling drivers and all. Boo Microsoft! I’m going to disable updates!
Just out of curiousity, was part of the problem the permissions settings the new version imposes on people if they ever had changed them in the past? (That is, turning all permissions for audio input devices and cameras off?)
Terry
@terrybritton: I don’t really know what exactly fixed the problem - I tried so many things, including disabling and re-enabling the soundcard - what I do know is that I never touched permissions prior to the last update and I didn’t touch permissions to get it working again, so my answer is probably “no”
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you CAN roll it back! Just grab the drivers for all your devices and let the fun begin. Microsoft has ‘generic’ drivers for your core hardware, (usually), and if not, the manufacturer will probably have them. It’s a pain, but well worth it!
Otherwise set all you known network ports to ‘slow connection’ and it won’t update. For others, there are registry edits and policy edits that can be performed. Go here for more info: https://www.easeus.com/todo-backup-resource/how-to-stop-windows-10-from-automatically-update.html
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Pointing this older thread about Win10 updates to a post in a newer thread about things to do to minimize problems when running the big Win10 updates.
https://community.cantabilesoftware.com/t/win-7-ending-support-affecting-vst-market/4188/4?u=dsteinschneider