Windows users face update bloat, and tough choices

[mahartzler]

My last Win 7 update on Oct 13 is the likely culprit of my large data use for October. Husband's Win 10 laptop also updated on Oct 12, as well as other times. This may be a stupid question, but is there anyway to tell Windows what hour of the day to check for updates? Win 7 allows me to set the time for install, but apparently not for download. I hesitate to shut it off completely, mostly because I'm not awake (usually not) at 2am to turn it back on (always assuming I'd remember to do so even if I were awake). Our 10GB plan just covered us for September (our first month), but we've been woefully behind for Oct. I just purchased my 2nd set of tokens, as we don't get refilled until the 10th of the month. Wish I had purchased the larger token bucket the first time. Hind sight is always 20/20. :-) Thanks!

[GabeU]

Good question.  It's been so long since I've had Windows 7 that I honestly don't remember, but I hate to say that I don't think there is a way to do it.  You could set it to just check for updates, but then manually download them in the morning or something.  That's about the only thing I can think of.   

Your first month probably went well due to the initial 20 days of daily resets, so your monthly data amount really only had to last for ten or eleven days instead of the normal thirty or thirty one.

Hopefully you'll eventually be able to fine tune your usage so you won't have to buy anymore tokens in the future.  It can be a trick, though, especially when you have multiple devices.     

[BirdDog]

I have 8.1 and you have pretty much the same settings. You choose to check for updates but not to download them. Then it periodically checks but you have to select to download and install whatever it finds.

[mahartzler]

You are correct, BirdDog, it is the much the same.

GabeU, you mean my first month's service wasn't really a dry run? Argh! That's painful news. We signed up with HughesNet for two reasons (1) because we were mad at both the broadband providers here in Topeka, and (2) because we're looking for property in a rural location that would likely necessitate a satellite service like HughesNet. It seemed to make sense at the time to establish service that could move with us wherever we end up.

It has been rough adjusting--and it IS an adjustment. Clearly we have some soul searching to do, because although it is just me and my husband, we have 6 devices--2 laptops, 2 smartphones, 2 tablets. We do have a kindle, but it doesn't get used much since we acquired the smartphones and tablets.

[Tim Phillips]

At the risk of not being Fapped and a Virus I am sure I am not the only one that has updates in some way turned off, I see no choice, I was fapped yesterday 2 minutes later google updates chrome....bam, dow to instantly 190 from 250MB........ on Win 7 and Win 10 both turned off...... if you think these days you can depend on the old style free download period, dream on, the Web Acceleration starts promptly at the start and some nights there is ZERO usable service......

[GabeU]

Well, they give the 20 days of resets to allow people to bring all of their devices to a current state without it affecting what would be a their normal monthly data allotment.  Upgrades, updates, downloading new programs/apps, etc.  Sometimes doing so can use quite a large amount of data.   

Getting the devices set to NOT auto update is a big thing.  Also, one of the other things is syncing.  If you have Windows 10, make sure it's turned off, and make sure to turn off "Update from more than one place" in your update options.  That one's really a pain for a capped service.  It's under "Choose how updates are delivered", which is under the advanced options in your update settings.  Using the cloud is also another bad one.  Syncing and updating from more than one place can be constant data drains. 

The actual updates for the OS's aren't all that huge, but "huge" is relative, of course.  For my three computers the OS updates are usually in between one and one and a half gigs, combined.  Then program/app updates are a bit more, but really not more than 2GB for everything, normally.  Then again, it all depends on what you have, and what versions of software you have, of course.   The difference in the sizes of the exact same updates for my laptop and desktop, which have the exact same OS, are ridiculous.  The laptop updates were nearly twice the size of the desktop updates.       

[GabeU]

I remember when you could update Windows 98SE in just a few minutes with a 28.8 modem.  LONG GONE are those days.  LOL. 

[maratsade]

In those days we also had some choices as to when and whether to update. Nowadays, Papa Microsoft knows better, apparently.