Comments on: Disable restart after Windows Automatic Updates

By: ryan

ryan — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:22:59 +0000

it’s already been said that gpedit.msc is only in xp pro, not xp home. so that’s why you couldn’t find it. so yeah.. it wouldn’t have been a waste of your time if you would have read comments.. so, fail on your part?

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:21:46 +0000

FAIL. First I press the start button, there is no “run” so I type it in the search bar, it pops up so I click it… then I type gpedit.msc but Windows cannot find gpedit.msc

why do people make these fake blogs!? just to waste my time? well you wasted it congrats!

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:40:34 +0000

thank you, soooooooooo much!!!!

By: thankful

thankful — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 10:26:23 +0000

many thanks!!!

By: Jared

Jared — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:14:30 +0000

THANK YOU Phillip for the sc stop wuauserv thing! Thank you for freeing me from the antics of Mr. Naggy McNaggerson forever!!!

By: Reilly

Reilly — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:37:39 +0000

Thanks for this!
As a gamer, it gets very annoying, very quickly, to have a full-screen game minimised every 10 minutes when you’re in the middle of something.

By: notlol

notlol — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:36:29 +0000

gpedit.msc only works on XP Pro. to disable in xp home go to control panel, admin tools, services and stop the “automatic updates” service. (dont worry, it will turn back on when you restart)
but you have to do this every time the popup comes up i belvie

By: rick

rick — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 15:28:37 +0000

Thanks a lot for the tips.
Yesterday when I am downloading a huge file from ftp site and expect to work on it today. At morning I found my machine got rebooted. Now I need another 10 hours to download it and how could I explain the delay to my customer.

The reboot will drive people crazy and make them hate microsoft.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:12:34 +0000

Jon, you should talk to the admin managing Group Policy to make this change system wide.

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:52:34 +0000

gpedit will change the setting this time round but once you reboot your PC the group policy for your domain will be pushed to the PC by active directory and this setting will revert to what it was before.

By: TOM

TOM — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:07:25 +0000

Excellent post.Thnx

By: Classified

Classified — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:59:20 +0000

Thanks this help a lot. I have the PC running Video editing programs over night and wake up to fine it rebooted… sucks.

By: Mic

Mic — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:39:56 +0000

Thank you very much, this stupid auto reboot already ruined one of my motherboards.. first bios flash failed in windows, and before I could attempt a second the computer rebooted while I was out of the room for a few min.

By: Photon Junky

Photon Junky — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:04:10 +0000

Latest Link for KB on MS.
“How to configure automatic updates by using Group Policy or registry settings”
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328010/

By: Charles

Charles — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 20:44:19 +0000

One last correction: Setting the “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations” To any value other than “Enabled” with your time between prompts entered causes it to default back to 10 minutes between prompts. Again, setting this to “Disabled” sets it to 10 minutes between prompts instead of getting rid of the prompts altogether.

By: Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:56:51 +0000

1. The Group policy thing will only take effect next time you log in. Same goes for the registry key. Changing either of these things will NOT stop popups that are bugging you right now — it will only stop it happening in future.

2. “net stop wuauserv” will stop the window bugging you NOW. It will NOT affect it happening again.

By: James

James — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:31:49 +0000

Thank you! I’ve been annoyed a lot with automatic 5 min countdowns, which end up being a scattered attempt at wraping up work before my PC kicks me off – how rude! In fact, I just got auto-booted last night about 3AM when I was running a 14 hour report…Can’t Microsoft be intuitive enough to see if the CPU and HDD is kicking to not restart?

By: Philipp

Philipp — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 19:11:53 +0000

Courtesy of lifehacker.com:
Works with XP Home!
To stop this service, open [Command Prompt] (Start>Run>cmd>Enter) and type the following command sc stop wuauserv. This will not prevent Automatic Updates from starting at the next boot. So don’t worry, you’ll keep getting Windows updates. Just don’t forget to restart eventually.

By: Cliff Johnson

Cliff Johnson — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:30:09 +0000

This doesn’t work.

I enabled this policy last time windows started to nag me, about two weeks ago.

Today, it started to reboot on it’s own once more. I re-checked this policy setting and it is still enabled.

I hate Microsoft.

By: Raymond

Raymond — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 05:17:47 +0000

XP Home users don’t have gpedit.msc. Fortunately, there is a regedit hack. http://computer-vet.com/weblog/2005/05/20/windows_automatic_reboots.html

It should also have a DWord value called RebootRelaunchTimeout. If it doesn’t, try making one. (Have not tried this with XP Home, but it just might work.) Set this as high as you can.