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I normally enjoy fast startup times of 2-3 minutes. However, on certain days, the machine is unusable for 30-60 minutes after wake. This happens when the hard disk is 100% busy downloading updates, which can happen even if the machine has been on and running for many hours on the previous day.

If I turn on my computer, it's because I want to do something with it. How can I prevent all the updates from downloading immediately after wake? I accept the security risk of delaying updates by a few hours, and no, I do not want to buy an SSD.

Here's an example that happened to me this week: the machine is on and downloads all updates and restarts. The CPU load is down to <5%, disk activity <10%, even with apps open in the background. The next day, after waking the machine, the disk activity is at 100% for more than 1 hour while windows proceeds to download all kinds of new stuff. Trying to open a folder in windows explorer takes several minutes while this is going on, anything else is totally impossible. Are the new updates that weren't available just one day earlier really so important that I should not be able to use my machine for over an hour?

ninemileskid
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  • Is it around the same time most of the time? – Ramhound Sep 11 '20 at 23:43
  • @Ramhound I don't think so, but it can be as often as every day. – ninemileskid Sep 12 '20 at 15:25
  • So you don’t know if you turn on your machine around the same time? – Ramhound Sep 12 '20 at 22:36
  • @Ramhound The issue happens when there is an update to download, and so far I have not been keeping track of what time it is when it happens. Should I? – ninemileskid Sep 13 '20 at 09:50
  • Windows 10 allows you to assign when you are active, Windows will not attempt to perform an update, during that period of time – Ramhound Sep 13 '20 at 10:01
  • No, Windows 10 will not *restart* the device during active hours. My problem is during the downloading phase, which doesn't respect my active hours settings. – ninemileskid Sep 13 '20 at 10:18
  • Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Professional? Additionally, what version are you running exactly, the options to change the behavior of Windows Update have recently changed. – Ramhound Sep 13 '20 at 10:25
  • Windows 10 Home, v 1909 (18363.1016) – ninemileskid Sep 13 '20 at 10:35
  • Windows is only updated once a week at most, normally, it’s once every other week. This doesn’t include updates to Windows Defender which are extremely small. What I would suggest is to use one of the methods to [delay Windows Update and handle downloading the updates manually](https://superuser.com/questions/946957/stopping-all-automatic-updates-windows-10). – Ramhound Sep 13 '20 at 10:41
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    Does this answer your question? [Stopping all automatic updates Windows 10](https://superuser.com/questions/946957/stopping-all-automatic-updates-windows-10) – music2myear Sep 13 '20 at 20:43
  • No. I don't want to stop updates, and I don't want to have to do all updates manually either. What I asked is whether there is a way to delay them from starting immediately after the computer wakes. (I haven't had a chance to try the third-party software at that page yet, but from what I have read so far, I'm not aware that any of them can do this.) – ninemileskid Sep 13 '20 at 22:43

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