How to Stop Windows 10 Update From Restarting Without Asking | Dramel Notes

Isn’t it annoying that Windows 10 automatically downloads and installs updates without notifying you? What’s worse is that it also restarts your computer at odd times to finish the update process. Let’s see how you can fix that.

Go to Settings > Update & security > Windows Update > Advanced options. The “Choose how updates are installed” option is set to Automatic (recommended) by default. Change it to Notify to schedule restart from the dropdown menu.

Going forward, once the updates have been installed, you’ll be asked to schedule a restart and you can pick a time that is convenient for you. This means no more unexpected system restarts when you’re in the middle of something important.

You have more control over Windows Update than you think. For example, you can check for updates, start them manually, or even defer them.

What do your Windows Update settings look like? Tell us in the comments.

Image Credit: The word reboot and hand pointing against orange push button by wavebreakmedia via Shutterstock

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How to Stop Windows 10 From Asking You For Feedback | Dramel Notes

Windows 10 doesn’t just automatically collect information about your computer usage. It does do that, but it may also pop up from time to time and ask for feedback. Here’s how to disable any Windows Feedback pop-up notifications you may see.

This information is used to improve Windows 10 — in theory. As of Windows 10’s “November Update,” the Windows Feedback application is installed by default on all Windows 10 PCs. Previously, it was only installed by default on Insider builds of Windows 10.

Tell Windows 10 to Ask For Feedback Less Often

You can change the frequency of how often Windows 10 requests feedback from the Settings app. To open it, click or tap the Start button and then select “Settings”.

Click or tap the “Privacy” icon in the Settings app.

Select “Feedback & diagnostics” in the sidebar here. If you don’t see the option, you’ll need to scroll down in the sidebar until you do.

The “Windows should ask for my feedback” option under “Feedback frequency” controls how often Windows 10 asks for feedback. By default, it’s set to “Automatically (Recommended)”. You can also set it to “Always”, “Once a day”, or “Once a week”.

Select “Never” and Windows 10 shouldn’t ask you to provide feedback anymore.

Disable the Windows Feedback Notifications

This part shouldn’t be necessary if you’ve told Windows 10 not to ask you for feedback above. But, if you’re still seeing notifications asking you for feedback, you can block them from appearing.

Open the Settings app from the Start menu or Start screen and select the “System” icon.

Select “Notifications & actions” in the sidebar.

Scroll down to the bottom of the Notifications & actions pane. You’ll see the “Windows Feedback” app under “Show notifications from these apps” if it’s showed you notifications.

Set notifications for the Windows Feedback app to “Off” and they won’t appear as pop-ups or in the action center any longer.

This is the same method you can use to disable notifications for other noisy applications, like the frequent “Get Office” notifications that encourage you to subscribe to Office 365 and download the latest version of Microsoft Office.

Launch the Windows Feedback App to Provide Feedback

You can still choose to provide feedback at any time. To open the Windows Feedback app, open your Start menu, select “All Apps”, and launch the “Windows Feedback” app. You can also search for “Windows Feedback” in your Start menu or Start screen to launch the app.

Sign into the app with a Microsoft account and you’ll be able to search for problems reports and feature requests, upvoting them if you have the same feedback. You can also submit a new piece of feedback that other people can vote on.

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This feedback is, in aggregate, used to help Microsoft understand how you feel about Windows 10 and its various features. If you don’t mind the feedback requests, you might want to leave them enabled and respond to Microsoft with your opinion.

After all, Microsoft removed the Start menu and Start button back in Windows 8 because, as it said at the time, few users actually used the Start menu according to the usage data it received. It’s likely that the “power users” who most frequently used the Start menu were also the same users who went out of their way to prevent Windows from reporting usage statistics to Microsoft.

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How to Roll Back Builds and Uninstall Updates on Windows 10 | Dramel Notes

Windows 10 automatically installs updates in the background. The only way to prevent them from being installed is to set your connection as metered so they don’t download automatically. But updates — especially major new builds of Windows 10 like the November update — could potentially cause problems.

This shouldn’t be necessary most of the time, but it’s something to try if you find your computer suddenly has a new problem. Microsoft’s patches aren’t perfect, and avoiding an update until it’s fixed might help. It’s also essential to follow these steps if you’ve learned a recent update is causing problems with your software or hardware.

Uninstall Major Updates, or “Builds”

There are two different types of updates in Windows 10. Aside from traditional patches, there are occasional big “builds” of Windows 10 that are released. The first new build of Windows 10 released is was the “November update” released in November, 2015. This is actually Windows 10 version 1511.

This is also an essential troubleshooting step if you’re part of the Windows Insider Program and you’re helping test new, unstable preview builds of Windows 10. If a build you install is too unstable, you can roll back to the one you were previously using.

To do this, open the Start screen or Start menu and select Settings. Navigate to Update & security > Recovery. Click or tap the “Get started” button under “Go back to an earlier build” to uninstall the current build of Windows 10 and go back to the one you were using previously.

This isn’t a way to opt out of new builds permanently. Windows 10 will automatically download and install the next major build that’s released. If you’re using the stable version of Windows 10, that may be a few months away. If you’re using the insider preview builds, you’ll likely get a new build much sooner.

If you don’t see this option, that’s because it’s been too long since you upgraded to the current build. Windows 10 will automatically remove these installation files after 30 days. It’s also possible that you ran the Disk Cleanup tool and removed the “Previous Windows installation(s)” files. Builds are treated practically like new versions of Windows, which is why you uninstall a build in the same way you’d uninstall Windows 10 and revert to Windows 8.1 or 7. You’d have to reinstall Windows 10 or restore your computer from a full-system backup to go back to a previous build after those 30 days are up.

Thanks to Windows 10’s new “Reset this PC” design, you can’t go back to an older build of Windows 10 by resetting your PC. Reset your PC and Windows 10 will give you a fresh system using the current build of Windows. This saves time, as you won’t have to update Windows 10 from scratch when you reset it — something you had to do with Windows 8.

Uninstall Typical Windows Updates

You can also uninstall the regular, more minor updates that Microsoft constantly rolls out, just as you could on previous versions of Windows 10.

To do this, open the Settings app, navigate to Update & security > Windows Update, select “Advanced options”, select “View your update history”, and then select “Uninstall updates”.

This pane also shows a list of the updates Windows has recently installed.

The Windows Control Panel will open with a list of recently installed updates. You can also access this by opening the Control Panel itself, clicking “Uninstall a program” under Programs, and then clicking “View installed updates” in the sidebar.

This list automatically sorts updates by the date they’re installed on. You can examine this list to see which updates were installed recently, if you’re looking for an update that may have caused problems. You can use the search box at the top-right corner of the window to search for a specific update by its KB number, if you know the exact number of the update you want to uninstall.

Select an update and click “Uninstall” — or double-click it — to uninstall it.

This list only allows you to remove updates that Windows has installed since installing the previous “build”. Every build is a fresh slate that new minor updates are applied to. There’s no way to avoid a particular update forever, as it will eventually be rolled into the next major build of Windows 10. Think of these builds a bit like the old “Service Packs” — they include all the changes that have been made to Windows 10.

To prevent a minor update from reinstalling itself, you may have to download Microsoft’s “Show or hide updates” troubleshooter and “block” the update from automatically downloading in the future. This shouldn’t be necessary, but we’re not entirely sure if Windows 10 will eventually try to re-download and install updates you’ve manually uninstalled. Even the “Show or hide updates” troubleshooter can only “temporarily prevent” this, according to Microsoft.

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Windows 10’s updates should hopefully be more stable than ever thanks to the new insider program that allows many people to test updates before they roll out to the masses, but uninstalling a problematic update and waiting for a fixed one may be necessary at some point.

Image Credit: Matti Mattila on Flickr

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Why is an Intermediate SMTP Server Needed to Send Mail? | Dramel Notes

It is technically possible to send mail directly to the recipient’s SMTP server from your computer.

Looking at it from a historical basis, if the remote SMTP server is down, you want a system to automatically handle it and keep retrying, hence you have an SMTP server. Similarly, in the old days, not all mail servers were connected all the time (long distance links were expensive), so mail would be queued and sent when a link was established.

Moving on to where Internet services are cheap, it is still useful to have mechanisms to retry sending mail if a server is unavailable. It is not ideal for this functionality to be written into the MUA (Mail user agent/end user mail program). These functions fit into an MTA (Mail server/SMTP server).

But it gets worse—spammers. Most mail (more than 80 percent) is spam. Mail providers do whatever they can to reduce this problem and a large number of techniques make assumptions about the way mail is delivered. The following are important considerations:

1. Greylisting: Some providers will automatically drop a mail connection if the sender and recipient have not communicated before and expect them to try a second time. Spammers often do not retry while an SMTP server is always supposed to. This reduces the volume of spam by about 80 percent, but it sucks to have to do this though.

2. Reputation: It is a lot more likely that someone sending mail through a reputable, known SMTP server is legit compared to a fly-by-night server. To get a feel for reputation, providers do a number of things:

• Block dynamic/client addresses (not 100 percent, but large chunks of the Internet have been mapped out).
• Check to see if the reverse DNS matches the forward DNS. Not very hard to do, but it shows some level of accountability and knowledge of best practices (something a lot of client address blocks do not have).
• Check for reputation. When communicating with other SMTP servers, a lot of providers keep track of the amount of spam and volume of mail sent. They can reduce the amount of spam by limiting connections and keeping an eye on these parameters. There are a lot of ways this is done, not all of them obvious, but which require a known sender.
• SPF and DKIM. These mechanisms tie DNS resources to the domain name to make forging mail harder and would be difficult, but not necessarily impossible to deploy if the mail program (MUA) is responsible for outgoing mail.

There are probably other minor concerns, but these would be the major ones.

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