None of this works any longer. You can disable the Windows Update service; Windows doesn’t honor that and turns it back to enabled. You can set the group policy to disabled as you’ve described; Windows doesn’t honor that and installs updates anyway. You can set the registry as you’ve described; again, Windows throws a big FU at the user. Good info here and I appreciate it, but apparently MS has decided that the user isn’t to be trusted with decisions of auto update.