How To Prevent Windows 7/8.1 From Upgrading To Windows 10

Windows 10 is Microsoft’s newest Operating System. It is absolutely important for all users to upgrade to Windows 10. This urgency can be judged by Microsoft’s offer to upgrade to Windows 10 for free. This offer is available for Windows 7/8/8.1 users for the next year.

We recently shared a guide on how to enable upgrade notifications on Windows 10 if it’s not coming up for you. The beauty of upgrading to Windows 10 is that you can always rollback your previous Operating System without losing your data if you are not satisfied with Windows 10.

But I don’t want Windows 10 at all?

If you are quite satisfied with your current Operating System and do not even want to test drive Windows 10, you may want to block and disable the upgrade of your Windows to Windows 10. One important thing to note here is that you don’t need to disable Windows Update in order to prevent Windows 10 from downloading and installing. There are other simpler ways by which you can get rid of the Windows 10 upgrade notifications which we will discuss in this article.

Getting rid of Windows 10 upgrade notifications

If you are using Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you will get a Windows 10 upgrade notification in your system tray very similar to this:

Windows update KB3035583 is responsible for giving this notification. If you uninstall this update from Programs and Features, you will no longer get the upgrade notifications.

If you are not comfortable with uninstalling the update mentioned above, you may try the tool called “I Don’t Want Windows 10 v2.0“. This tool will disable Windows 10 upgrade notifications.

There is another method by which you can disable Windows 10 upgrade notifications using Windows Registry. You simply have to run the following registry file to disable the notifications.

This is just a simple registry script with the following contents:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx] “DisableGwx”=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate] “DisableOSUpgrade”=dword:00000001 [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade] “AllowOSUpgrade”=dword:00000000 “ReservationsAllowed”=dword:00000000

You can also alter the Windows Registry manually but make sure that you backup your Registry so that in case of any problem, you can always rollback to the previous stable point.