Registry key / GPO to disable and block Windows 10 upgrade?

One of our remote Windows 7 Professional users just reported that he received an Upgrade Reservation Offer for Windows 10. It appears the Get Windows 10 "App" running in his system tray is legit. So far, this is only seems to be hitting devices that are not domain-joined.

Short of uninstalling/hiding the Windows Update that enabled the upgrade, is there any way to disable the Upgrade App (and of course the upgrade itself)?

Solution 1:

According to this article you can add the following registry entry to disable Get Windows 10:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\Gwx]
"DisableGwx"=dword:00000001

Try HLM\Software\WOW6432Node\RegisteredApplications\GWX and rename it.

Solution 2:

To properly disable the Windows 10 upgrade as recommended by microsoft I would advise reading the following article:

Ref: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3080351

Computer Configuration

To block the upgrade by using Computer Configuration, follow these steps

Click Computer Configuration.

Click Policies.

Click Administrative Templates.

Click Windows Components.

Click Windows Update.

Double-click Turn off the upgrade to the latest version of Windows through Windows Update.

Click Enable.

Policy path

Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update Policy

Setting: Turn off the upgrade to the latest version of Windows through Windows Update

Windows registry

Important Follow the steps in this section carefully. Serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Before you modify it, back up the registry for restoration in case problems occur.

To suppress this offer through the registry, specify the following registry value:

Subkey: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate DWORD value: DisableOSUpgrade = 1

Solution 3:

It's this guy: KB3035583. You may want to script a wusa.exe /uninstall for this one if it's already in the wild. This has been big news today, as Microsoft put this out last Patch Tuesday, and somehow forgot to mention the time-delay sales pitch set for June 1st.

Normally you would block this update in WSUS/SCCM. Of course, in this case you couldn't have known what to block. I certainly didn't get a notification from my MS team in my Advance Notice emails.

The folks over at SuperUser are ALL over this today as well:

https://superuser.com/questions/922068/how-to-disable-the-get-windows-10-icon-shown-in-the-notification-area-tray