For those running Windows a constant annoyance is the message from Microsoft annoying them about upgrading to Windows 10. Some users even report being tricked into upgrading!
Microsoft is offering the upgrade to Windows 10 for free until mid-2016 and they want to push as many users onto Windows 10 as possible. Their motivations here are probably money. Windows 10 has an app store and ability to show ads to users that Windows 7 does not. Microsoft knows that Apple and Google are making oodles of money from their app stores and they want that as well.
But a lot of us love our Windows 7 (or 8 or 8.1) systems and we don’t want to upgrade. But the message keeps on popping up no matter what we do.
So here is how to block that annoying upgrade nag forever.
Method #1: Download and Run “Never10”
Steve Gibson is a famous security expert and computer programmer. He’s created a program called “Never10” that blocks the Windows 10 upgrade message forever (or until you want to unblock them).
This option is the easiest. All that you have to do is download the Never10 program from Steve Gibson’s website and run it.
You can download it from his website here: https://www.grc.com/never10.htm
Method #2: Edit The Registry Manually
If you don’t want to download and run Never10 then you can do what the program does yourself manually. Be warned that editing the registry directly can be dangerous and should only be done by experienced users.
Here are the steps:
- regedit
- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
- Create a DWORD value called DisableOSUpgrade and set it to 1