Protect your cellphone data from Windows 10 updates

When I used to tether my cellphone to my laptop to get internet access through my 4G connection, I sometimes got a nasty surprise in that hundreds and hundreds of megabytes were getting downloaded in the background. The culprit was Windows 10 updates.

There are two ways to connect your laptop to the internet through your cellphone:

1. You can connect them with a USB cable and enable tethering on the cellphone.

While this provides a quick and convenient way to get internet access through your phone, it does have a serious downside. The internet connection appears to Windows 10 as an Ethernet connection. Windows 10 updates can silently download whenever they'd like and can put quite a drain on your cellphone's data.

2. You can enable your cellphone as a Wifi hotspot and connect to that hotspot from your laptop.

One of the properties that can be set for Wifi connections in Windows 10 is to designate the connection as "metered". A metered connection prevents updates from being downloaded in the background.

Designating your Wifi hotspot as a metered connection is a simple process:

First, click on the "Properties" link on the connections pane:

On the Properties page that opens, scroll down to the "Set as metered connection" setting and turn it on.