The automatic updates feature in Windows 10 allows you to download the driver updates so that some the older versions of the driver software can be updated or replaced by the Microsoft’s drivers. But this is not always desirable and many people do not want Windows to monkey around with the already working device drivers that came with the computer.
Fortunately, Windows allows you to disable automatic updates from downloading the updates of the device driver software through the use of a group policy setting. Here is how you can make Windows 10 avoid downloading driver updates:
- Press the hotkey Win+R, type regedit in the Run dialog and press Enter.
- In the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate. If this key does not exist, then you will have to create it.
- After WindowsUpdate sub-key is selected, right-click on the right-side pane and choose New → Dword Value (32-bit).
- Give the newly created value a name ExcludeWUDriversInQualityUpdate and set its value to 1.
- Close Registry Editor and restart your Windows PC.
After making these changes, your Windows computer will no longer download device driver updates from Microsoft servers. This setting works in all the editions of Windows 10 except in the Home edition. And if at any later time, you want to download the new versions of drivers for your Windows computer, you can either disable this setting by changing the value of ExcludeWUDriversInQualityUpdate to 0 or you can use dozens of driver update software that we have posted about on this website from time to time such as DriverHub, Wise Driver Care, IObit Driver Booster, Snail Driver, and many more. In fact, some of these driver update programs do a much better job in keeping your drivers up-to-date by downloading the drivers from the OEM websites that often result in a much better performance compared to the drivers provided by Microsoft.