For the longest time my gaming rig would start to act up after windows updates,
and for some reason windows ignored the “don’t do updates” settings.

Since this pc is only used for gaming once a week and is only turned on for those 2 hours I don’t want to deal with a machiene that kills itself after boot.
I just want to game.

So I decided to put the pc behind a squid proxy and monitor the traffic, which made me throw up a little.
But anyway I found lots of microsoft domains and started to block them one by one, and checked if it would still do update stuff.

Over time the list below grew, and I added a few more thing I found useless to it as well.

What happens is that te system can’t get any updates, and a few ad-related things stopped working as well as the microsoft store.
Which is all fine for me, since this system has to run games and their launcher apps - thats it.

This worked very well for months, but since the steamdeck was released and the linux gaming experience got so much better…I don’t need this setup anymore.

Updated list from 2024-12-08

windowsupdate.microsoft.com
.update.microsoft.com
.windowsupdate.com
download.microsoft.com
.download.windowsupdate.com
wustat.windows.com
ntservicepack.microsoft.com
.gvt1.com
.prod.do.dsp.mp.microsoft.com
settings-win.data.microsoft.com
graph.microsoft.com
oneclient.sfx.ms
.trafficshaping.dsp.mp.microsoft.com
android.clients.google.com
beacons.gcp.gvt2.com
displaycatalog.mp.microsoft.com
.events.data.microsoft.com
.bing.com
.overwolf.com
.onenote.net
.msn.com
.teams.microsoft.com
.live.com
.msedge.net
cxcs.microsoft.net
emdl.ws.microsoft.com
checkappexec.microsoft.com
licensing.mp.microsoft.com
.delivery.mp.microsoft.com