How to save bandwidth in Windows 10 using delivery optimization?
Delivery Optimization is a Windows 10 feature that improves the Windows update experience. It is extremely useful when you have a local network with multiple computers running Windows 10. The settings app says the following about Delivery optimization,
If you have an unreliable internet connection or updating multiple devices, allowing downloads from other PCs can help speed up the process.
What exactly does delivery optimization do?
In a nutshell, it downloads updates from PC in your network(or internet depending on your setting) in addition to Microsoft’s servers. Here is how it works,
- You have a laptop and a PC both connected to your home network.
- Your laptop downloads a Windows update or a app update from Windows Store which incurs data charges & bandwidth.
- If the delivery optimization is turned on, the laptop will now store the downloaded update files for n number of days.
- When the PC that is connected to the same WiFi as your laptop needs to download that update, it will see that your laptop already has the downloaded files and will just get the files from your laptop instead of downloading it from the internet. This will help you same some bandwidth and internet costs.
A thing to note here is that, delivery optimization does require disk space to temporarily store the updates files for a few days. Sometime, this can go upto 6-8GB. So, don’t turn on this feature in PC with very low storage space.
How to turn on Delivery optimization?
- Open Settings App in Windows 10
- Go to Update & Security -> Delivery Optimization
- Turn on “Allow Download from other PCs”
- Choose PCs on my local network. Don’t choose “PCs on the internet” as this will cause you to use more bandwidth by upload updates to the internet.
Is Delivery Optimization Private?
Only the update files that are downloaded from the Microsoft servers are shared to other PCs. Your files and other stuff are not uploaded or shared.