i didn’t find it that difficult to disable updates as i indicated in my post,which was on a W10 Home version ...
however, either way, Group Policy-wise or otherwise, disabling updates is beyond the capability of the average consumer ... so millions of people get their PCs trashed on a regular basis when Microsoft repeatedly sends faulty major “upgrades” once or twice a year that clobber parts of their systems ... I’m surprised that Microsoft hasn’t lost all of their W10 consumer customers by now ...
I have purchased several Pro licenses through eBay to upgrade for just a few dollars each. None of them have gone bad so far. For me it was worth the small amount of money to get the group policy editor, the additional virtualization features, and some other minor advantages. The group policy editor allows one to disable and re-enable automatic updates without workarounds that might cause other issues.