Windows 10 WIn 10 unsuccessful upgrade to 1803

[Fredsie]

My situation is this. I have an 11 year old laptop. This is now ONLY used as a display for a weather station, using a proprietary Windows XP application, so I am not interested in any new Windows features that 1803 might bring. Nevertheless up until now I have let all upgrades proceed.

Now however we have 1803. Unfortunately this upgrade always fails, with some vague "something went wrong"-type error code that no one can give a precise cause for. So every couple of days I get a prompt to upgrade. If I accept and reboot, the system attempts to install 1803. After about an hour, this fails and Windows recovers back to the previous version. This takes another hour, then all is well. Finally, after a day or so, I have to go through the whole pointless 2-hour process again.

Is there ANYTHING I can do to get the updater to leave me alone? If it helps, I do not actually need Internet access at all on this machine; the data from the weather station comes from another device on my home LAN. But I can't seem to prevent Windows from "calling home". I've even tried giving it a fake proxy IP for internet access. That worked for a while, but eventually it still managed to download the update files.

Would be extremely grateful for any effective solution.
Thanks
Fred

 

[helpifIcan]

Probably a corrupted download. Stop WUASERV if running (window update service).
Rename SoftwareDistribution file (just add you initials to the beginning).
Restart WUASERV hopefully this will cause a new download of the update and then do the update without error.
This will create a new SoftwareDistribution directory with the new files.

 

[Fredsie]

Thanks. Sadly I tried this already. The last failure was the third fresh download; I can't believe they're all been corrupt. And the last one was after a complete system restore back to build 16299. This update is not going to work on my machine. As I say, I don't really mind that, I just want to be able to ignore it somehow.

 

[helpifIcan]

The only other thought is to get the iso from MS and try and reinstall keeping all your files.

Repair Windows 10 Install Without Losing Apps & Data