How to handle windows feature upgrades in a busyness setting?

[TraxXavier]

Hi,

Among the many things that are a catastrophe with windows 10 there is one NTLite can't fix, its the short support cycles for not LTSC editions.
Ideally M$ wants one to upgrade twice a year, in a Enterprise Setting one can delay that to once every year.

but and that is a big BUT!
When it upgrades its like a new installation so NTLite customizations will be erased, right?

So how to handle this in a busyness scenario effectively? Running with the one single seat USB drive to every PC after upgrade and reapplying the feature removals and privacy tweaks sounds like a lot of work so its not an good option.

Make a new customized windows 10 setup disk and again run to every PC jus this time before it upgrades itself? Sounds also like a lto of work so not good.

Is there a way to customize the feature upgrade package on the WSUS server? Probably M$ made sure that this will not work due to signatures and similar annoyances.

Never the less something similar to the last mentioned way sounds really best, is there any way to get something like that to work?

Cheers
Trax

 

[nuhi]

Hi,

yes, Windows Feature updates overwrite removals. However, you can use the Host Refresh wizard to bypass that.

You could pre-configure an ISO and deploy that as an upgrade to all the machines.
For example script running the setup.exe from it with the switches to your wishes, from a network share.
Run setup.exe /? from the ISO folder root to see the options.

Still, it is not easy to recommend removals on a mass scale, you are always risking manual reinstalls due to unforeseen issues in future Windows updates.
The scripted pre-configured ISO refresh solves 99% of those issues, if that turns out to be viable for you.

Please check if WSUS ISO deployment supports upgrade mode, haven't checked, very interesting. I doubt it would check for ISO signature, as WIM images in them are freely customizable, support capturing from the admin partition.