Picture of a typical Windows 10 desktop.

How to Disable Upgrade to Windows 10 Notification

Be aware, should your Windows 7 computer offer you to upgrade to Windows 10, that its assurance that your PC is compatible may not always be true.  We found this out on a Dell Inspiron N5110 laptop machine. In these cases, you may choose not to upgrade your computer to Windows 10.  So, you’d rather not see the periodic messages about the update.  So in this piece, we show how to disable upgrade to Windows 10 notification messages.





Reasons Why Not to Upgrade to Windows 10

Upon upgrade to Windows 10, the machine hung during booting, with the hard drive light glowing constantly.  Unable to get to the recovery options, we wiped the hard drive and reinstalled the Windows 7 Home Premium.  Further research on Dell’s web site showed that Dell does not support Windows 10 on this device.  Yes, we might have been able to troubleshoot the problem down to some driver problem.  But the customer said that she really doesn’t need, “the latest and greatest,” operating system for her work. She said that Windows 7 on her laptop would be fine.

We sas a problem though, once we reapplied all Windows 7 updates.  That was that her machine began prompting to upgrade to Windows 10, and prompted often at that.  It displayed that little 4-windows icon constantly in the task bar.  But not wanting her to upgrade by accident, we found that we could disable upgrade to Windows 10 notification messages and the icon as well. We detail how to do that below.

Disable Upgrade to Windows 10 Notification, How To

  1. On the Windows 7 laptop, go to the desktop.
  2. Open Control Panel by clicking the Windows icon (usually on the left end of the horizontally oriented task bar.
  3. Then, locate the “Notification Area Icons” app and run that by left clicking.
  4. In the resulting window that comes up, find the GWX (Get Windows 10) icon.
  5. In the Behaviors drop down list menu, change the value from “Show icons and notifications” to “Hide icons and notifications”.
  6. Then, click the OK button.
  7. Verify that the GWX icon (white window pane set) in the task bar has disappeared.

This routine should mask the GWX icon and disable upgrade to Windows 10 notification messages that appear after mostly every boot up.  If you don’t want to risk people upgrading to Windows 10, then disable this icon as described above.





Related Posts 

  1. How to Change Windows 10 COM Port Number for USB Modem
  2. Setting Windows 10 Voice, Text to Speech
  3. How to Shut Down Windows Without Applying Updates
  4. Finding Radio Stream URL Using URL Snooper 2 for Windows
  5. Setting Default System Voice, Windows 8

References for Disable Upgrade to Windows 10 Notification

  1. Windows 7     on Wikipedia
  2. The Windows 8 Operating System     on Wikipedia
  3. Windows 8.1  on Wikipedia
  4. Windows 10   on Wikipedia

Revision History

  • 2019-05-02: Added targeting for ‘Disable Upgrade to Windows 10 Notification’, more tags, and subheadings.
  • 2015-11-09: Added appropriate tags.
  • 2015-10-29: Originally published.