Bah!
Never mind this nonsense!
Can someone please explain why Windows update (Win7) is suddenly and persistently running at a steady 52% of my laptop's CPU capacity despite the "windows user experience" malware being disabled?
The behavior started recently and has proved immune to all measures (including leaving it alone for 12 hours to see if it was actually doing real useful work like re-indexing itself or something rather than just spinning its wheels to make doing real work hard, slow and annoying) except shutting the service down. Once I do that, my system flies like Concorde from a properly cleaned runway, (as it bloody well should with twin cores, a couple of gigahertz clocking and 8 gig memory on tap. Spinning rust, but spinning at 7200).
Windows 10 users have only themselves to blame. A sucky user interface welded to an unfinished engine designed primarily to move the user to a cloud-subscription-except-you-buy-the-hardware model rather than be a useful progression from what he/she had before. The first vendor to start actually selling Linux Mint web-books and webtowers (instead of talking big about "coming plans") will clean up like it was 1995.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
