We all have been there before, whether you are in the middle of working on your laptop/desktop or logged into a Remote Desktop session, that pesky Windows Update appears. No matter what you do, you can’t get rid of how annoying that restart box is.
Doing this you get rid of two major annoyances of mine. First, there isn’t a nuke button popping up on your screen. Second, it’s completely out of sight and out of mind. Windows Update, I WILL REBOOT WHEN I FEEL LIKE IT. How do you like them apples?
Update: After doing some digging, I figured these settings could be controlled via Group Policy. If you open gpedit.msc, the settings sure enough are there:
Like I said before, Home versions of Windows do not have this capability, so what to do? Regedit! Apply these regedits and you, yes YOU, can disable the nuclear time bomb yourself. Make sure you know what you are doing within the registry before you start editing. I cannot assume any responsibility and will offer no help if you nuke your PC doing so.
4 comments:
So amazingly simple, yet I never thought of it! I can't tell you how many times I've nuked myself with that darn "Restart Now" button. It always has focus, too, which is just plain bad UX. If you hit Enter in that sweet blog post, you're hosed.
M.
Glad you found this useful Marc. I added some more options to this post. If you are using Home versions, you can apply these regedits to disable the nuke bomb yourself.
In XP you could stop the "Automatic Updates" service so that you wouldn't be prompted again until you got around to rebooting. I would expect that stopping the "Windows Updates" service in Win7 would accomplish the same thing.
I prefer this because sometimes it's convenient to go ahead and reboot to get the updates finished applying and this gives me the choice.
@Kevin,
I would caution against disabling such a critical service unless you are prepared to deal with the ramifications of forgetting to turn it back on.
You *could* set in the Task Scheduler a PowerShell script to run on computer start that would automatically turn this service on, but for such a critical service to Windows, I'd rather do the regedits or GPO it.
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