MINI WORKSHOP
Share downloads between your computers
If you have two or more PCS on your home network, you can further reduce the amount of data you need to download by letting them update each other. That way one will download the whole bundle and share it with the others, or they’ll each download part of it and spread the parts across the network. This feature isn’t available when you’ve told Windows you’re using a metered connection.
1 Go to the Settings screen (or click the cog in the Windows menu), click ‘Update & Security’, make sure Windows Update is selected in the sidebar, then click ‘Advanced options’. Click Delivery Optimization 1 , then switch on ‘Allow downloads from other PCS’. Now make sure the upper of the two buttons below is selected, so that ‘PCS on my local network’ is active (not ‘PCS on my local network, and PCS on the Internet’).
2 If the option to enable this feature is greyed out (as it is here 1 ) and you’ve not set Windows to behave like it’s on a metered broadband connection, it will have been disabled in the registry. To re-enable the feature, you’ll need to manually edit the registry, which shouldn’t be done before you’ve created a system restore point.
3 In the Windows search box type create a restore point and click the first entry in the list. In the System Properties box that pops up, switch to the System Protection tab then click ‘Create’ 1 . Call your system restore point ‘delivery optimisation’, as that’s what we’re going to tweak, then click Create. When Windows has finished creating its restore point, close the System Properties window.
4 Now type regedit into the Windows search box and click Registry Editor. Next, click Yes when Windows asks to authorise it to make changes to the system. Navigate through the folders in the sidebar in the following sequence: HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE/SOFTWARE/POLICIES/MICROSOFT/ Windows. Click the Deliveryoptimization folder, then select ‘Export’ from the File menu. Name the exported file 'delivery optimization’ and save it to the desktop 1 . This will make it easy to find if you need to undo the next step. Click Save.
5 Right- click Deliveryoptimization, select Delete, then click Yes when asked to confirm. Return to Settings, click the arrow in the title bar to go back to the ‘Advanced options’ screen, then immediately return to where you were by clicking Delivery Optimisation again. The options below ‘Allow downloads from other PCS’ will now be active 1 , letting you set it to share downloads with other PCS on your network.
6 Should you wish to undo the changes you made to the registry, return to the Registry Editor, click ‘Import’ on the file menu, then select the ‘delivery optimisation.reg’ file you saved to the desktop. Click Open and, when Registry Editor confirms that the keys and values contained in the file have been successfully added to the registry, click OK 1 . the top of the main part of the window, immediately below the Wifi heading. Click its name, then scroll down and click the switch below ‘Set as metered connection’ to On (see screenshot above left).
It’s important to bear in mind that doing this doesn’t only delay downloading updates. It also pauses several other services, including Onedrive updates. If you frequently use Onedrive to synchronise documents and other data between your PC and another computer, tablet or phone, nothing will pass in either direction until you re-enable syncing.
Click the Onedrive icon on the Windows taskbar, then click the pause button beside ‘Your files are not currently syncing’ to resume synchronisation while pretending to use a metered connection. Alternatively, open your notifications by clicking the speech bubble on the taskbar and click ‘Sync anyway’.