If you use Microsoft Windows 10, your computer and your internet connection aren’t yours. Windows owns them. Your needs and preferences as a user matter little in relation to what Windows wants to do to you.
If Windows 10 decides it wants to download a mega-update, it can just do it. That will make your internet connection unusable for however long it takes to download however much stuff Windows decides to download. It doesn’t matter what you want to do. What Windows wants to do has priority over what you want to do.
You can’t effectively tell Windows to share the available bandwidth with you. You can’t effectively tell Windows to do the update later. Sure, if you’re sophisticated enough to go in and change some general policy settings, you can try to get Windows to share bandwidth with you and pause updates until you get done what you’re trying to do. In my experience, those settings do nothing. It’s maddeningly difficult even to know what Windows is doing on your computer to destroy your internet user experience. If you go into task manager, you just see “Service Host: Local System” consuming all your bandwidth.
Pushing new features in Windows users’ faces at exactly the same time those users are infuriated that a Windows update treats them like serfs on their own computer isn’t a good marketing strategy. Windows 10 Creators Update? That’s not credible when the Windows update treats me like a serf. Why should a serf believe that an oppressive lord is really offering him something good for his personal creativity? The situation is worse than that. I literally use LibreOffice rather than activate Office 2016 (which I bought) because I don’t want to Office 2016 to abuse me with updates.
I’m plotting to seize my computer and my internet connection back from Windows. Microsoft has made me into a serf relative to my Windows overlord. It’s time for a peasants’ revolt.
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Note: The above post describes my experience using Microsoft’s Windows 10 operating system through early August, 2017. Windows 10 was released to general users on July 29, 2015. The most recent update pushed at me seems to have changed the updating behavior. I don’t understand exactly what has changed. Based on past Microsoft action, I don’t trust Microsoft to respect what I want to do with my computer and my Internet connection.
[image] Modern peasant with pitchfork. Image thanks to ErikaWittlieb, available under a permissive Pixabay License.