Allan Hirt wrote a post back in February entitled “Stop Automatically Updating Production Servers” in which he gave some excellent reasons on why you should ensure that your servers are only updated manually (after all who wants an accidental production down scenario, am I right?).

This hasn’t hit me as a problem as all of my servers are disconnected from the Internet and there’s no WSUS server configured for them to reach, we just push patches down to the machines from a central location. I was perfectly happy with this scenario, and still am, however there is a PITA reason why I wanted to turn off the automatic checks for Windows Updates; constant dumping of events into the System and Application Event Logs:

I was really sick of seeing these errors and wanted a quick way to turn off Windows Update without having to go through the multi-click interface nonsense.

Once more PowerShell to the rescue.

Disable-WindowsUpdates.ps1 does just what it says on the box. It disables Windows Updates on the machine it’s run on (provided that’s allowed by Group Policy). You have to execute it as an administrator. When it done it will remove those pesky alerts from the logs and you can feel free that Windows won’t decide to reboot your servers in the middle of the day to apply that IE update you’ve always wanted.