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So as a follow-up... Even after disabling automatic updates in the group policy editor in Windows 10 Pro... this nightmarish October surprise started updating all over again when I tried to check what other updates were available. So after it finished I restarted the laptop and it seemed to work OK for a few minutes. Then one of the other annoying “features” of Windows 10 started up. A complete scan of the system using Windows Defenders new anti-virus definitions. The computer became completely unusable. Of course you can’t stop it or even pause it once it gets started. I did a restart and the desktop wouldn’t even come up. The task manager would come up when I did a control-alt-delete and I could see it was the same processes taking 100% of my hard drive’s bandwidth.

So I actually had some work that I needed to do on it. So I shut it down and started up with F11 which on my laptop goes into recovery mode, and did a Windows restore back to the state the computer was in before the October surprise update. An hour later the laptop seemed to be ready to go, but even with the rollback the scan of the hard drive started up again and the computer was again unusable. After leaving it on all night to complete the scan it is working OK again this morning.

So I have decided to skip the problematic October update altogether. Microsoft has been futzing up people’s computers for two months now and they still have not got their act together. It is downright embarrassing. This major feature update is mostly about increased integration with your cell phone. To me this means it is all about Microsoft scheming to break into an area that they have lost to Apple and Android and not in their customers best interests. So this wasted the better part of two days for me, caused a great deal of irritation, and delayed work I wanted to do. I had to edit and upload over a hundred photos I took at an event on my old Windows 7 laptop.