Are you concerned that the latest and greatest updates to Microsoft’s Windows 10 might be a little buggy? Certain versions of the operating system allow you to delay the updates.
Windows 10’s twice-a-year updates mean more new features, more often. Unfortunately, major updates can also break things. If you’d rather wait until the bugs are squashed, tweak this setting and delay those updates until they’ve gone through more testing.
Since this is technically an enterprise feature designed for large-scale deployments, it’s only available in Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, and Education. Testing every single piece of hardware and software for conflicts is nearly impossible for Microsoft, so this allows businesses to test major feature updates on a few machines, make sure everything works, then roll it out to the rest of the company when they’re ready.
Fortunately, many of us have Windows 10 Pro on our home desktops and laptops, and this feature works even if you only have one or two computers at home. Here’s how to take advantage of it.
The wording here is a bit confusing, but “targeted” computers enter the queue for updates as soon as they’re available. This is the default setting. Non-targeted computers, on the other hand, will get feature updates once they’re deemed ready for widespread use in organizations. This usually happens after a few months of feedback and bug fixes from users on the default “targeted” channel.
You can also delay those big feature updates even further by using the next drop-down. This will defer the update up to 365 days after your channel would generally come to your computer. You can defer it up to 365 days after the Targeted channel or the non-Targeted channel. (We don’t recommend deferring security updates using the third drop-down.)
Note that Microsoft has changed the wording of this feature once before (it used to be called the Current Branch for Business), and it’s already planning to change it again, but the ability to defer updates should remain.
Of course, the longer you defer updates, the longer you’ll miss out on new features, so this is best used for those mission-critical machines you can’t afford to lose. You can then test the update on a secondary machine (if you have one) to see if it’s stable enough for your daily work, and update your other computers accordingly.
