Bypass the installation imposed by Windows updates

You have likely noticed that the Windows operating system automatically downloads system updates as a background task, and then waits for you to turn the machine off to install them. This is unless the user hasn’t already manually launched the installation process.

If you have a large number of updates to install (following the reinstallation of the machine, for example) and you don’t really want to run the update at this time (for whatever reason), then here is how you can delay these updates which can take a long time to install.

In practice it’s not very complicated, as you firstly need to close the user session and then turn the machine off from the new window which appears once the session is shut. The installation of the updates will then wait until the next time the computer is shutdown.

Note: to see if there are any updates awaiting installation, simply click on the Windows Update service icon present in the task bar notification area. If this icon is present, then there are updates waiting to be installed.