I've had the same conversation four times this week. A friend, a coworker, my sister-in-law, and some guy at the coffee shop who overheard me complaining, all asking the same thing: "How do I make that Windows 10 icon go away without it just installing itself?" So instead of typing this out a fifth time, here it is.
If you're on Windows 7 or 8.1 and you've got a little white-and-blue Windows logo camping out in your system tray, that's GWX ("Get Windows 10"). Microsoft pushed it out back in the spring through Windows Update as KB3035583, technically labeled as a "recommended" update, which is a pretty generous word for something that reserves a 3GB+ download on your machine whether you asked for it or not. I didn't ask for it. Nobody I know asked for it.
To be clear, I don't hate Windows 10. I put it on my desktop the day it launched and mostly it's fine, Edge is rough around the edges and the Start menu still feels like it's apologizing for something, but it's fine. The problem isn't the OS. The problem is a background nag process that eats CPU cycles checking eligibility, that plants a shortcut on your desktop you didn't put there, and that on at least one machine I've touched, straight up scheduled the upgrade overnight without a clear confirmation click. My sister-in-law came down for coffee and her laptop was mid-install. She never told it to do that.
So here's what actually works.
Option 1: GWX Control Panel
This is the fast path. Steve Gibson (yes, the SpinRite guy, still cranking out utilities at GRC.com after all these years) put out a free tool called GWX Control Panel. You download it, run it, and there's a big obvious button that says "Disable 'Get Windows 10' app." Click it. It kills the tray icon, stops the nag, and blocks the reservation process from running again. It also has a "monitor mode" if you're paranoid Microsoft will just re-enable it on the next patch Tuesday, which, given the track record here, is a fair thing to be paranoid about.
It's a single .exe, no install wizard, nothing weird bundled in. I trust it more than half the "PC cleanup" software that comes preloaded on a new laptop.
Option 2: Do it by hand
If you don't want to run a third-party tool on principle, or your IT department won't allow it, you can do this with a registry edit:
- Open regedit (Windows key, type
regedit, hit enter) - Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\ - If there's no
WindowsUpdatekey under there, right-click and create one, then create aGwxkey inside it - Inside
Gwx, add a new DWORD (32-bit) value namedDisableGwxand set it to1 - Reboot
That kills the app itself. If you want to also stop Windows Update from re-downloading the installer package in the background (which is the part actually chewing up your disk space and bandwidth), go into Control Panel > Windows Update > View update history > Installed Updates, find KB3035583, and uninstall it. Then hide it so it doesn't come back — right-click the update in the optional list and choose "hide update."
A couple of notes from actually doing this on three different machines this week. On one of them the registry key alone didn't stop the tray icon until I also rebooted twice, not once, for reasons I can't explain and didn't feel like debugging further. On another, uninstalling KB3035583 took an oddly long time, like twelve minutes, longer than the actual Windows 10 upgrade took on my own desktop back in July. Your mileage will vary and that's just how Windows Update patching goes sometimes.
None of this is anti-upgrade advice. If you want Windows 10, get it, reserve it properly through the app, let it happen on your schedule. This is only for people who want the choice to be theirs and not a scheduled task Microsoft picked for them. Given how many people I've walked through this exact fix in the last seven days, I don't think I'm the only one who wanted that choice back.