In this post I’m going to show how to quickly configure Windows Updates so that you only receive important security updates. We’ll cover Home and Pro/Enterprise users of both Windows 10 and Windows 11. These are also the settings I use myself and recommend for most users. These settings may also be helpful for IT admins. Set Active Hours - Windows 10 By default Active Hours are configured to be automatic but personally I think it’s better to set them manually.

The New News and Interests Bar for Windows 10 In the June updates for Windows 10 the News and interests bar has been rolled out to Windows 10 and is enabled by default. If you want to disable it as a user, it’s easily done by right-clicking on the Taskbar > News and Interests > Turn off. Job done. 👍 Registry The registry entry for the setting is per-user and is located here:

Fully disabling Network Discovery in Windows 10 using Group Policy To properly disable Network Discovery in Windows 10 in a way that the user cannot easily re-enable we must create some firewall rules and prevent some services from running on start-up. We can do both things using Group Policy. Firewall Rules Create a new Group Policy or use an existing one that takes effect on computer objects. Go to Computer Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Windows Firewall with Advanced Security.

You may have seen the option to use Windows Update for Business and wondering what it brings to the table when compared to WSUS and SCCM. Windows Update for Business (WUfB) is a good way of simplifying and automating the deployment of Windows Updates without using any on-premises infrastructure. The downside is that you do loose some control, but the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. As I always say, it does depend on your infrastructure and environment though.

In this post I’ll walk through how I manage and test the delivery of Windows Updates to all my clients and servers. I’ll also go through how I manage essential servers like Domain Controllers, Hyper-V hosts and I’ll touch on getting started with Cluster-Aware Updating. We’re going to group our machines into Clients and Servers, and then group each of those groups into Ring 1 and Ring 2. If you want, you can create more rings for more control, but generally I find two rings are sufficient.

UPDATE 2017-11-07 After testing the method below on Windows 10 1703, I found that it wasn’t working as it did with 1607. To disable One Drive and remove the One Drive folder from the Navigation Pane of Windows Explorer, enable the group policy item: Computer Configuration/Policies/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/OneDrive/Prevent Usage of OneDrive for file storage and also set the following registry key from 1 to 0: 1 2 HKEY\_CLASSES\_ROOT\CLSID\{018D5C66-4533-4307-9B53-224DE2ED1FE6} "System.IsPinnedToNameSpaceTree"=dword:00000000 Please note that the registry key must be set on a per user basis.

This week I’ve gone pretty deep down the rabbit hole of automating the Start Menu and Taskbar layouts during an MDT Task Sequence. Update 2017-05-02 This also works with Windows 10 1703 (Creators Update) As every device I’m deploying will have the same customisation I wanted to automate it during the build or deploy Task Sequence, rather than applying it via domain Group Policy to reduce limited network bandwidth, keep Group Policy as light as possible and reduce login times as much as possible.

I thought about trying to find a better name for this post and this issue, but this is all I could come up with. Update 2017-10-16: A few people have contacted me and made me aware that doing the reg hack below can prevent users from using Microsoft Office Clipart, so you should be aware of that before proceeding. Additionally, I’ve found that with Windows 10 1703 (Creators Update), allowing access to http://www.