Almost all of the settings are a simple on off switch. Group policy and the settings menu. Both are easily navigatible GUIs with clear descriptions of what the switches do. You only have to go the hosts file route if you want the extreme of completely disabling updates.

I work in sysadmin in a Windows environment. I haven't had to touch the registry (for Windows configuration, we won't talk about dumbass software devs) in over four years, and it was only because I didn't check group policy first.

Please, for the love of all that is worthwhile in this world, don't lecture others on the ease or difficulty of configuring systems if you aren't actually familiar with how to configure those systems.