Patchfluent is an open-source tool that gives Windows 10 users much more control over how regular system updates are downloaded and installed. Patchfluent works with Windows 10 and has a requirement that you should turn off Windows 10 Automatic Updates first. This requirement makes sense because Patchfluent is for manual installation of updates – if automatic updates are turned on, how will you install updates manually?
Patchfluent is a very small program and does not require any installation on your Windows PC. As you launch it, it will display whether your Windows PC has automatic updates service disabled or enabled. It should be enabled but the automatic updates should be turned off. At the same time, the automatic updates service should not be removed altogether from your system.
According to the developers of Patchfluent, you can turn off automatic updates either through Group Policy Editor or through the Patchfluent user interface itself. You can also use the Registry Editor to turn off the automatic updates in this manner:
- Launch Registry Editor (click on Start, type regedit and press Enter).
- Navigate to the following key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU\ - Create a new DWORD-32 value, name it
NoAutoUpdateand change its value to 1.
From the Patchfluent interface, you can view the update history and the optional updates available for your system. It automatically scans your system and then finds out all the updates needed. If these updates are available, then you will be shown a list of these updates. You can view a small description about each of these updates when you click on them in the list. You can choose to download and install them if you desire. This way you can install the updates yourself without depending on the Microsoft’s automatic updates.
This tool is extremely useful when you want to have much more control over the updates, want to postpone the updates or want to selectively install the updates on your Windows 10 system.
You can download Patchfluent from https://github.com/builtbybel/patchfluent.