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 Turning
Off Windows Update in Windows XP
By DANIEL CALLOWAY,
TheWorldJournal.com
Do you feel comfortable allowing Windows to update itself? Many readers
may not like the idea of Windows secretly downloading and in some cases
installing programs on their PCs without their knowledge. It's true that
Windows Update is an important feature built into the Windows XP OS, but
unless the user has full control over what is happening and a complete
disclosure of the results of the installation is revealed, many users may
wish to turn off the process altogether in order to regain control of
their PCs. Here's how it can be done.
First of all, let me make it clear that I don't recommend users to ignore
Windows Update. Why? Because to do so would negate the patches, fixes, and
most importantly security updates that are unfortunately necessary to
perform from time to time. Microsoft has a white paper on how to go about
turning off the automatic updating in Windows XP. This white paper can be
found at
www.microsoft.com/WindowsXP/pro/techinfo/administration/manageautoupdate/.
This white paper gets into the details of how to properly perform this
task if that's what you really want to do. However, there are other means
of controlling auto-updating of Windows XP.
Setting auto-update to manual can be accomplished by clicking on the
Control Panel | System | Properties. Disabling Automatic Updates under
Administrative Tools | Services is a more reliable way of controlling
these updates the former method, however.
Systems Administrators can disable Automatic Updates to Windows XP and
control these within their own organizations. How is this accomplished?
Very simply, administrators can create a series of Administrative
Templates under the folder C:\WinNT\Inf. The Wuau.adm template controls
the auto-updating. After adding these templates to the Administrative
Templates under the default Domain Policy, they will be listed under
Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Update. Then by
disabling Configure Automatic Updates, any images created from this image
to users will have the automatic update feature disabled. The new Domain
Policy can be run through user logons as well, disabling the automatic
update feature.
Windows XP's Profiles features can also be used to accomplish the
disabling of the automatic update feature. The initial state of Windows XP
is saved under a Profile called Default. Then, creating other profiles in
which the auto-update feature and other services have been disabled will
ensure that users who logon to Windows XP under one of the disabling
Profiles in Windows XP rather than the Default Profile will not be
prompted for any automatic updates.
There is a very good step-by-step guide to creating alternate Profiles in
Windows XP which can be found at
www.blkviper.com/WinXP/xpprofiles.htm.
These instructions were created by a web gamer called Black Viper. His
website is chocked full of Windows XP goodies.
Windows XP ships with some 89 services, 36 of which run automatically when
Windows XP boots up. Black Viper claims that only 8 of these services are
really needed and the others cost you around 70 MB of RAM to run in the
background. With this in mind, having Windows Update service running
automatically in the background might just be a waste of precious RAM when
you could install them yourself by visiting Microsoft update website
whenever you wanted to pull down and install needed security
updates/patches/and fixes.
Related web sites:
Microsoft
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