Don't tell people to turn off Windows Update, just don't
Found on Troy Hunt on Monday, 15 May 2017
Often, the updates these products deliver patch some pretty nasty security flaws. If you had any version of Windows since Vista running the default Windows Update, you would have had the critical Microsoft Security Bulletin known as "MS17-010" pushed down to your PC and automatically installed.
This is how consumer software these days should be: self-updating with zero input required from the user. As soon as they're required to do something, it'll be neglected which is why Windows Update is so critical.
That would be a no-brainer suggestion if Microsoft wouldn't have royally messed up the update procedure. With every new update milestone, reports about problems are getting scarier: reboot loops, more telemetry, behavioral changes and software incompatibilities. It looks like Mirosoft has pushed the alpha and beta to the users. The final nail into the coffin was the decision to label the Windows 10 upgrade scareware as an important update. Before all that, regular updates were a common thing; after that, users got fed up with those business decisions.