As much as I know from experience that Windows Updates can mess things up... please don't turn them off. They do apply patches to protect against known exploits.
If you'd like to turn off Windows updates, it'd be much better for you to experiment with running Linux (which also has regular updates but has a better track record of them not messing up your system).
I'm very happy having run Linux for over 13 years as my primary operating system. I work with Windows everyday at work with customers' systems and see the frequent security problems that Windows has. Linux isn't perfect, but compared to Windows security Linux is like a vault safe to Window's "piggy bank".