[cryptarch]

Disabled the SMB services yet? Win + R -> services.msc

I routinely disable services (until things stop working and I have to figure where I went too far) and luckily I'd disabled this one on my Win7 gaming box, even though the updates came through as well (I just manually vet updates, and have a bunch of them blacklisted for adding telemetry).

[codedokode]

Are you sure this is enough? At least on WinXp, port 445 is opened by a kernel driver and is still opened after stopping the SMB service.

[reacweb]

Disabling services is good, but beware that they may be re-enabled during a software update. Once a service is disabled, you have to monitor that is remains so.

[ak39]

Wouldn't it be a great feature of Windows update to warn its users that once manually disabled services are now being forced to be active?

[cryptarch]

I'm not sure, I only learned to manage services when I was already on Windows 7.