Stop ‘Feature’ updates installing on your PC

Installing Microsoft’s twice-yearly ‘Feature’ updates can be unnerving because you never know whether they will cause problems, such as disabling settings you’ve carefully configured. There are ways to delay updates, but they involve tweaking the registry or upgrading to Windows 10 or 11 Pro. It’s much cheaper and easier to use the new program InControl (created by the developers that built Never10 in 2016 to stop Microsoft automatically installing Windows 10 on your computer). Visit www.grc.com/incontrol.htm, then click the small, green ‘Download now’ button in the grey panel. It’s a portable tool, so should run automatically. You’ll see a message in red saying ‘OS upgrades are not under your control on this system’. Click the ‘Take Control’ button at the bottom ( 1 in our screenshot) and this will change to a green message: ‘YOU are in control…’. Once activated, the tool will block any feature updates, though monthly (security) updates will still be allowed. You can even tell InControl which version of Windows you want to upgrade to – when it becomes available – by changing the numbers at the bottom left 2 .