The question is usually about how to prevent the receiver from going to sleep after a long period of no remote presses. I don't recall that there is a way to do it.
Well, there's no disabling of updates, but he can disable the number of hours of inactivity before receiver goes into standby.
Again...Menu -> Preferences -> Updates (right side of the box)
Also, when receiver completes nightly updates, receiver will default to standby. Way around that is to set a manual, daily, auto tune timer a half hour or so after scheduled update time.