Disabling Or Postponing The Windows 10 Notifications
As we have posted before, Windows 10 is not for everyone.. at least not now/yet. There are plenty of business, security, and software concerns to be addressed with Windows 10 before you begin upgrading your business machines. However, are you getting a daily (or even hourly) annoying pop-up from Microsoft on your work or home system about “Reserve your copy of Windows 10″? These Microsoft ads are both intrusive and unnecessary. Let’s disable them, shall we?
[callout style=”red” title=”WARNING” centertitle=”true” align=”center”]The following process is for use by advanced users, your ESG engineer, or your on-site IT team. If you are not 100% comfortable with using tools like regedit, do not proceed. You must be a local admin on your system in order to follow these steps. ESG recommends trying on a home system first if you need the practice.[/callout]Blocking Windows 10 Update Notification Via Registry
You can block the ads/pop-ups/icon from showing and disable notifications. This can be easily done now using the following process, and undone when you are ready to get your ‘free’ Windows 10 upgrade downloaded.
- Using the Windows registry editor (regedit at the run line), navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx
- If the Windows and Gwx do not exist, create them as Keys
- Create a new REG_DWORD registry value called: DisableGwx
- Give it a value of: 1
- Reboot!
That is it.. no more pesky Windows 10 reminders. When you are ready to enable them again, just edit that 1 to be a 0 and reboot again.