How to easily Pause or Stop Windows 10 Updates

This brief tutorial shows students and new users how to easily pause or stop Windows 10 updates.

You see, Windows 10 automatically downloads updates and patches in the background, which may be real pain for folks connected to slow or low-quality internet.

While automatically downloading Windows 10 updates in the background is good and wise thing to do, at times you want priority tasks or work to be completed quickly, and if your Internet connection is slow, the background download services will make it slower.

Windows 10 also doesn’t make it easy to pause background downloading of updates.

To do it, you can follow the steps below:

Open the command line terminal as administrator

Only the administrator or members of the administrators group can pause or stop Windows downloads. A standard user won’t be able to stop Windows updates

Right-click the Start button and select Command Prompt (Admin)

stop windows 10 updates

Run the commands below to stop background downloading of updates

After opening the command prompt as administrator, run the following commands stop Windows updates and Background Intelligent Transfer Service

net stop wuauserv
net stop bits
net stop dosvc

These services will be stopped and Windows 10 computer will be unable to download necessary updates for your computer. So it’s important that you re-enable these services as they’re very important for your Windows 10 systems.

To restart these services again, run the commands below

net start wuauserv
net start bits
net start dosvc

Restarting these services allows Windows to begin downloading updates again. Or just restart your computer and the services will automatically be started.

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.3.9600]
(c) 2013 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

C:\Windows\system32>net stop wuauserv
The Windows Update service is stopping.
The Windows Update service was stopped successfully.
C:\Windows\system32>net stop bits
The Background Intelligent Transfer Service service is stopping.
The Background Intelligent Transfer Service service was stopped successfully.

That’s it! Enjoy and please come back!