How in the Tech

Permanently postpone “restart your computer to finish installing .. updates” nag

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 24, 2010 ⋅ Tags: Annoyances, Windows

We’ve all seen the famous Windows nag dialog or pop-up that urges us to restart our computer to apply or otherwise finish installing security updates and patches pushed out by Microsoft via their WindowsUpdate framework. Typically, the updates are published on the second Tuesday of every month and by default, your Windows PC will install them in the early morning of the following Wednesday.

There are many reasons you may not want your system rebooting while you are not around so this can create a potential issue for you. As Windows Update is an essential service for safe computing practices, you can’t just disable the process nor is it wise to postpone the installing of critical updates until it is 120% conveinent. The last option then is to install the updates automatically but rather than automatically rebooting at the end, instead wait for confirmation from the user. Sounds like a workable solution until you realize Windows will nag you every so many minutes until you finally comply to the reboot request. The dialog is intended to be annoying – you aren’t patched until the restart after all. Still, the dialog window is so pervasive that it can often times lead to accidental activation – the outcome you’ve been trying to dictate on your terms all along!

As luck would have it, you’ve got a couple options at your disposal – one more temporary while the other is more permanent.

Temporarily addressing the situation involves stopping the system service that is responsible for the nag. Open a Command Prompt with admin-rights.

In Command Prompt, execute the command net stop wuauserv to stop the system service for your current Windows session. Upon your next reboot the service will start-up automatically – which is what you anyways.

To adjust the behavior more permanently we have to turn to the Windows Registry.

Traverse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU. Should it not exist, right-click on WindowsUpdate and select New->Key.

In the right hand panel create a New DWORD (32-bit) Value with the right-click, New option. Name the key NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers.

Double-click on the newly created key and set the value to 1 to enable the functionality.

This change will allow you to postpone the nag dialog in Windows XP – just like it is natively possible in Windows 7. However, the change needs to be made ahead of time as a reboot is required to activate it for future instances!