Disable restart after Windows Automatic Updates

The Windows Automatic Updates feature is great, however those nagging reboot reminders can drive you crazy. I can only recommend to turn this off.

Usually, this restart now/restart later pop up appears when I am doing something important or when I have some remote connections open. I also like it if Windows rebooted automatically during my lunch break while several virtual machines are running.

In my view this feature doesn’t bring in extra security. All these pop up windows warning about security issues are more or less useless. People get used to them, and click on them automatically. In this way these pop-ups might even decrease security. If there ever is an important security message, the user will just click away without really reading it because he is trained to do so.

So here is how you can turn off the restart reminder of Windows Update:

1. Click Start -> Run
2. Enter “gpedit.msc”
3. Go to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update
4. Double-click on “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations” “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Update installation”
5. Disable it! Enable it!
6. Reboot the computer

You can also change the default setting of “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations” to remind you once a day, or so if you can still stand these pop-ups. If you want to change this for your whole network, you can use Group Policy. For security reasons, I recommend that all computers should be turned off after work or office hours.