How to cancel Windows 10 upgrade after installation failure

Hi Gayle,

Sorry to hear about your dog passing away. It's sad that pets can't live as long as their owners.

As far as Windows Updates are concerned, here's a screenshot of how my own system is configured to receive them.

As you can see, I've chosen not to receive either Recommended updates (which includes Windows 10 of course) or updates for Microsoft products.

So every Patch Tues, all I get are security updates with the odd optional update(s) which are often of no interest to me.

But others such as security patches get downloaded and then I can choose whether to install them or not. I tried the other option which is to choose whether to actually download them or not even, but found that to be too problematical.

As regards Windows taking an hour to boot, that's crazy. So do the following to check the hard drive for file system errors.

1. Hit Windows key + X and click Command Prompt (Admin).
2. Type: Chkdsk /f and hit Enter.

You'll get a message that a diags check can't run because the volume is in use and whether you want to schedule a check on the next reboot. Click Yes and then either reboot immediately, or finish what you're doing for the day and then either reboot, or just shutdown.

When the machine boots up again, the diags check will run. You can choose to cancel it within 8 seconds, but if you ignore that, it'll run. It shouldn't take more than ten minutes, but could take more if the tool finds errors which need to be fixed.

After the machine boots the the desktop again, do the following.

1. Hit Windows key + X and click Event Viewer.
2. Expand "Windows Logs" and then right click "System" and click "Filter current log".
3. In the menu which opens, change Anytime at the top to something which reflects the time you ran Chkdsk and then in the Event Sources dropdown menu, scroll down and checkmark Wininit.
4. Click OK and you should see just one Event log. Right click that and click Copy ----> Copy Details as Text.
5. Come back here, right click and click Paste which will paste the log file you copied.

If you want to keep a copy of the log file open Notepad and paste it in there as well.

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Another thing to do is to run the Disk Cleanup tool.

1. Hit Windows key + R, type: cleanmgr and click OK, OK.
2. The tool will scan your hard drive for files which can be safely deleted.
3. When you see the menu where you can checkmark boxes, click the "Cleanup System Files" button. This will cause a secondary scan to run. There might be a couple of folders on your machine still called $Windows.~BT and $Windows.~WS

Since you're not going to upgrade to W10 anymore, these can be deleted using the "cleanup System Files" button. They won't be described that way in the disk cleanup tool, but you should be able to see the description "Previous Windows installations" (or words to that effect) or possibly "Temporary Windows installation files". I've never installed Windows 10 so I can't tell you exactly how they're described.

But anything in the Disk Cleanup menu can be safely removed.

So sorry, thought I replied to this weeks ago. Since the death of my very dearest canine friend, I'm afraid my brain is screwed in backwards.

But yes, DWORD, not QWORD.

The little program that was recommended (GWX Control Panel) seems to have done the trick, though. Windows 10's update monster has not crept back out from under the bed again.

However ... is anyone else having huge and cascading computer issues since the whole "Get Windows 10" fiasco began? The problems started before I ever tried to remove the thing, though continue to escalate. This computer was running like new, with absolutely no problems, before the Get 10 nag arrived. I'm not sure if it was the various efforts to get it to go away, the original OK'ing the update that then failed to install, or it just screwed my system up royally in general.

I had to switch to tell Windows not to download updates unless I checked them and told it okay. It quickly shifted then to my only being able to install one update at a time once they were downloaded, or the computer would lock up. For the last several weeks, I can't do even that. I can't install any updates at all. If I check one at a time, it will download them, but then get halfway through the "installing update" bar and just stop. The bar goes gray, I can't stop the installation, can't back out of Windows Update, all I can do is reboot the computer. Which, of course, may be part of the problem -- I'm sure it doesn't help an already screwed up application to have to crash it deliberately in mid stream.

The system is also taking ages, and I mean sometimes over an hour!, to boot up in the morning. Half the time, all of my background programs won't even load. I don't know what half of them are (they came stock with the system and since I don't know what they do, I haven't tried to remove them, since they never caused an issue till now). The one it "usually", but not always, hangs on is when it's trying to connect to Skydrive, which I almost never use. I don't mind not having that (or most of the others) autoload, but I have to be very careful to make sure my antivirus is up and running. Most of the time it will hang before that one is working.  There have been days I've had to reboot the system once or twice to even get it to boot up in a functional format.

None of this was occurring before Microsoft decided everyone on the planet needs Windows 10.

I'd say someone owes me a new computer, but it would probably have Windows 10 pre-loaded, and then I'd be really scr**ed. LOL

When you created the registry key called "DisableOSUpgrade", you did choose DWORD and not QWORD I hope (?).

I had another user yesterday who found Windows 10 trying to install in spite of the registry setting and it turned out she'd created a QWORD because she thought that was appropriate for a 64-bit version of Windows.

Perhaps the checked version of *5583 was a hold-over from a previous download on my system. I am not at the computer as much as I was previously, and I hadn't checked updates in at least several days.

I did hide it again, and so far it's staying hidden. I do find that, since the nag box first showed up on my computer, I cannot just let Windows do all selected updates at once. If there are more than two or three in the queue, it will hang indefinitely (I thought it was running on shut-down last night and this morning woke to find that the computer was hung up at the exact same progress spot as it was when I'd gone to bed). I have to force a shut down and reboot to get the computer back at all, and then waste a couple of hours installing one update at a time.

I never had a problem before the whole Get Windows 10 fiasco began. This laptop is not that old, and was still running like a new machine before Microsoft decided we all needed to "improve" our lives, whether we wanted to or not. :-/

I've tried unchecking and re-checking the "Notify me when someone responds" box just now. Let's see if that does the trick.