Click on Update Installed Products - always says no updates and todays date

Background Updates says - greyed out - activate background updates while we can click on deactivate background updates (should I deactivate background updates?) 

Automatic Updates (task scheduler) is all greyed out

Refresh Updates - we can click on refresh updates for installed products and it will then update.

I have no clue what this background updater does or does not do. I do know that we have had lockups and cannot get into our tax software in the morning (we have multiple scheduled software updates overnight and obviously when Proseries decided to do updates without any input from us, there was a memory overload - it used up all the memory on the workstations. 

I need to be able to let my people manually update the workstations as they come onto the system as some have other tasks before tax returns are worked. By spreading it out manually I don't overload the internet connection so that it is so slow we cannot do anything on client's computers, etc.