How to use Group Policy to defer Windows Quality and Feature updates

Sometimes feature updates can cause issues with the base operating system or third party applications. This post explains how to defer either Quality updates or Feature updates to Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 in a domain environment.

Defer Updates with Group Policy

1. Open Group Policy Editor.
2. Create and link a new policy or edit an existing one if appropriate.
3. Navigate to:
   • Computer Configuration
   • Polices
   • Administrative Templates
   • Windows Components
   • Windows Updates
   • Defer Windows Updates
     

Defer Feature Updates

Feature updates tend to cause more issues than quality updates. Microsoft have an update branch called “Current Branch for Business”. This branch is not deployed until Microsoft considers the feature update safe for enterprise deployment. You can choose this option only, or introduce a further delay if required.

Defer Feature updates as follows:

1. Double click on “Select when Feature Updates are received”.
2. Click on “Enabled”.
3. In the Branch readiness drop down, select “Current Branch for Business”.
4. Enter the period for which you want to delay the deployment of this update:

Defer Quality Updates

Quality updates can be deferred for a maximum of 30 days.

Defer Quality updates as follows:

1. Then double click “Select when Quality Updates are received”.
2. Click on “Enabled”.
3. Enter the amount of days that you want to defer for.

It might seem risky to defer quality updates, but there have been many occasions when these have also caused severe problems. I recommend that you have a subset of computers that receive updates first (which do not have these policy settings defined).

A customer using Cyberark EPM on Windows 10 had to defer update 1809, which at the time of writing has compatibility issues.