There has been plenty of heated discussion about the way MS has handled updates in Windows 10. Much of that discussion has centered around Windows 10’s update push behavior, which forces updates on Windows 10 PCs whether the recipients want them or not (see one workaround for this in my 7/27/15 post on the MS “Show or hide updates” tool). One additional consequence of this behavior is that, following the application of some updates, Windows 10 will automatically reboot itself within 24 hours at some scheduled time or day or night — I’ve got my time window set for 3:30 AM, for example, since I’m pretty much never up and at the PC at that particular time myself. Alas, however, sometimes we don’t want Windows to reboot for awhile, usually to preserve machine state because of something we’re working on, watching, or otherwise engaged with that would be derailed thereby. That’s why I was pleased to see a Registry hack made public over at Sergey Tkachenko’s excellent Winaero.com site yesterday, in a blog post entitled “How to prevent Windows 10 from automatically rebooting for update installations.” In that post, he also shows the somewhat tyrannical warning message that Win10 displays when the scheduled boot time is nigh:

No choice but to close all apps and batten down the hatches when this message appears.

Here’s the registry hack involved, for those comfortable with mucking about therein:

1. Launch the registry editor (e.g., type “regedit” in the Search box).
2. Navigate to this registry key:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows
   \WindowsUpdate\AU (all on one line of text, please)
   If the key does not exist create it.
3. Within the key create a DWORD value named NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers and set its value to 1.
4. You must restart your PC (in a cruel twist of irony) for this change to take effect.

That’s all there is to it. Enjoy!

Note:

The article was originally published by Ed Tittel @ TechTarget: IT Knowledge Exchange on October 23rd, 2015. It is reproduced on this blog with an author’s permission.