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Stop Automatic Restarts after Automatic Windows Updates

Date: 01/06/2009
Category: Windows

Question:

After leaving my computer to encode a large video the other day, I was surprised to come back and find it sitting at the login screen. Initially I thought perhaps the CPU had overheated during the stress of encoding, restarting the computer after a crash. However, after logging in I was soon greeted with a message telling me, not "Windows has recovered after a serious error" as I expected, but rather something along the lines of "Windows has successfully restarted to finish installing updates". The nerve! Is there any way of stopping it from doing this in the future? I'm running Vista Home Premium.

Answer:

This one's quite quick; hit the Windows key and type "gpedit.msc", then press ENTER (if you get a UAC prompt, just click 'Yes' or 'Continue'.

Now navigate to: "Local Computer Policy> Computer Configuration> Administrative Templates> Windows Components> Windows Update"

One the right-hand side, double-click "No auto-restart for schedule Automatic Updates installations" and set it to "Enabled".

And that's it, no more random restarts! Also, this works in XP Pro and the release candidate of Windows 7.

As always, before changing any system settings, you should make sure that you have a full backup of your registry/system beforehand. For more information about backing up your registry/system, click here .

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