This how-to is for all non-US users of Windows 10 who have capped broadband plans – i.e. only get XX gigabytes of data per month.
Pre-Step A
Go to:
- Start
- Settings
- Update & Security
- Windows Update
- Advanced Options
Now make sure ‘Choose How Updates are Installed’ is set to ‘Automatic (recommended)’ as shown below:
[Note: if this option is set to ‘Notify to reschedule restart’ at this point, Windows becomes…confused and could go into a perpetual loop. Mine did and I had to do a hard shutdown to get it to stop].
Step 1 – Finding the ‘Metered connection’ option
Click on the Start button and then select:
- Settings
- Network and Internet
- Wifi
- Advanced Options
Under ‘Metered connection’, click the slider button to show ‘on’:
Step 2 – changing how Windows 10 updates are scheduled
Now go back to:
- Settings
- Update & security
- Windows update
- Advanced options
and under ‘Choose how updates are installed’, change ‘Automatic’ to ‘Notify to schedule restart’.
Now, Windows 10 will notify you of:
- available updates, and
- how much broadband they will use
but it will not download and install them automatically. This is what my laptop now shows:
My heartfelt thanks to The Opening Sentence for showing me where the ‘Metered connection’ option was hiding! I feel a lot better now. 🙂
cheers
Meeks
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NANO 2012
August 26th, 2016 at 6:23 pm
Thanks. I have something to add, in the ‘it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you’ column. I bought a new laptop in 2014 and at some point in 2015 ‘upgraded’ to windows 10. I still have my 2010 office disc set, so didn’t need to install any of that. At that time I went through all my settings (as you have) but today you prompted me to double check. One of the updates I permitted has reset a number of my settings. I’m going to overhaul them all again now. It’s probably the same update that disabled the headphone port (grrr!)
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August 26th, 2016 at 11:07 pm
😦 I read that that might be a possibility. 10 really is taking Big Brother way too far.
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August 27th, 2016 at 12:53 am
Yes. Indeed (to quote one of my fave geeky shows!)
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August 27th, 2016 at 8:29 am
lol
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August 27th, 2016 at 5:21 am
Yeah the updates did reset some settings but you can disable most them again. For the rest, there are 3rd party utilities.
I think MS will try in the future to go with windows as a service. But it may not work all that well in the OS side of things. Because unless you are doing something really niche, you’ll find replacement apps in other OSs and so migrate to them. Adobe doesn’t give Creative Suite as a one buy anymore, having it as subscription only instead. So i’m waiting for a Mac app to migrate to windows that does what photoshop does and is around 150USD.
Man i’m happy i live in a small island so that these practices couldn’t have caught on. So small that we have 4 main ISPs and it happens that i personally know people working as support in all of them.
I went to 50Mb cable for the same price as the 8Mb DSL i had. And i asked them if they have any data caps or fair use policies and the guy said “we do have some guidelines if things get out of hand, but before we throttle an area down, we try to do some load leveling with areas that aren’t using bandwidth.” So far i’ve been throttled up, not down 😛
We are pigheaded in a lot of stuff but even ISPs go “what? no i’m not doing that.” Cause they’ll go home and they’ll get phone calls from relatives that “their internet is broken and it’s not fast anymore and they should fix it”.
(wow i managed to spiral out of the conversation again)
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August 27th, 2016 at 8:21 am
-giggles- Interesting rant there George! And you’re lucky that it is ‘personal’ in Cyprus. Here, we have caps and one of two things happen if we go over – we have to pay a LOT for all the extra data or…the speed goes down to dialup until rollover for the next month or we buy extra data blocks to tide us over.
Very early in my internet life I ended up with an $800 bill because I didn’t know these things.
As for 10’s data mining…that I’ll fight to my last breath. 😦
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August 28th, 2016 at 4:24 am
i went to my mobile phone service provider for something that i don’t remember right now. And i remember one of the service personnel there calling a customer that wasn’t paying, telling them “you have 3 telephone lines and you haven’t payed for them in 4 months. Tell us which one you don’t use so we can park it, or at least pay 1 month for each one to show that you care about them so that we won’t have to disconnect them.” I was thinking “i’d go there with a pair of scissors and cut the wire…”
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August 28th, 2016 at 10:57 am
-blinks- I was just thinking I’d go to THAT SERVICE PROVIDER in a heartbeat. I know it’s not good business practice but boy…talk about customer service and caring for your clients. Can I emmigrate? lol
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August 27th, 2016 at 5:26 pm
Thanks… next time I get the laptop out I’m changing the settings as it’s been nagging me to update automatically so I’ve had to just to power it off rather than logging off… not a good long term practice…
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September 13th, 2016 at 5:15 pm
Yeah Meeks, I’ve just started using a laptop and W10.
I have in mind to sit down and work through your suggestions for reset and settings. Soon.
Thanks for the tips.
Cheers,
Frank
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September 14th, 2016 at 8:39 am
Welcome and good luck. 🙂
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