Microsoft just tried to force my 1909 devices to 2004

For the last few months, my PCs (a self built gaming PC and an old Acer tablet) have had the “Your PC is not quite ready for the update! Learn More” box about the 2004 update. They were both on 1909.

Anyway, I checked this morning and both of them had decided to auto-install 2004 and were at the “Restart to install the 2004 feature update” stage. Not very happy about this, since this is exactly what Microsoft had promised not to do anymore until the current Windows version was close to being out of support.

I cancelled the installs by choosing “Pause updates for 7 days” (which cancels all in-progress updates) and then set the Defer Feature Updates back to 365 days. When I unpaused the updates, they both went back to showing no new updates. Hopefully they’ll stay that way. (Neither of them has the “2004 Feature Update” box at all anymore.)

Anyway, I guess the lesson is if you don’t want Microsoft auto-installing updates, make sure the “Defer Feature Updates” option is turned on, because the whole “you can choose when to install Feature Updates” thing was apparently a lie (or at least a buggy implementation).