Thu Sep 19, 2019 2:29 am
Yes the TP Link does have a WAN connection - I will have to do some more experiments!!
Later the same day:
My TP Link, when used in the way you suggest, does work but does not have any facilities for restricting access apart from parental controls. Parental controls can restrict access times and has the facility to restrict particular words. Inserting words like Microsoft or update.microsoft has no effect on access to any Microsoft website.
Thus my conclusion is that your method of restricting access MAY work in particular cases but has no general validity.
Have you checked that your restrictions actually work - can you access Microsoft websites?
Even Later the same day:
I found this on a Microsoft forum which shows how update works and (maybe) how to stop it.
The process that was doing the actual downloads is
C:\Windows\UpdateAssistant\Windows10Upgrade.exe
Which then downloads files to
C:\Windows10Upgrade\
which in turn downloads files and handles backups creatings windows.old etc.
After adding it to a process blocker the error message immediately closed, so I renamed all of the files in this folder to have .BAK (rather than delete, so I'd have the option of updating at will if I should ever want to) and then changed the ownership of the folder to administrators, disabled inheritance (explicit permissions), and changed everything to read only so that new files cannot be created here.
So, to recap, to actually stop windows updates I had to do the above, set C:\Windows10Upgrade to read only, set everything to metered in the registry, and disable the following files:
windows/system32/qmgr.dll
windows/system32/wuaueng.dll
windows/system32/wuaueng.dll.mui
windows/system32/wuauclt.exe
and now, at least in theory, I should have control over my computer.
Don't get too carried away by this method as I suspect MS have already disabled it. My Win10 PC does not have a C:\Windows\UpdateAssistant\ folder.
csw900