Home : Products : General : Disable Windows Update's "Do you want to restart your computer now?" nagging dialog
Q10891 - HOWTO: Disable Windows Update's "Do you want to restart your computer now?" nagging dialog

The infamous dialog looks like this :

Problem is that it wont go away. It will keep nagging you every 10 minutes. Then it gives you 5 minutes with a countdown. Step away from a computer, and you end up loosing all your work. This has happened to me numerous times, so i decided to write a solution for this problem. This was performed on a Windows XP SP2 machine.

  1. Run gpedit.msc (you must have local administrator priviledges)
  2. Navigate to Windows Update as shown in the tree below
  3. The "Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations" setting does the following :
  4. Disable it, or alternatively change it to a longer interval
  5. you may also want to "enable" the "No auto-restart" setting
  6. If the dialog keeps popping up, it is because the service responsible for spawing it only reads the settings above on its startup.
    To refresh the settings, restart the "Automatic Updates" nt service.

Related Articles
No Related Articles Available.

Article Attachments
No Attachments Available.

Related External Links
No Related Links Available.
Help us improve this article...
What did you think of this article?

poor 
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

 excellent
Tell us why you rated the content this way. (optional)
 
Approved Comments...
No user comments available for this article.
Created on 4/10/2008 10:04 AM.
Last Modified on 4/10/2008 10:26 AM.
Last Modified by No Author Name Available!.
Article has been viewed 8634 times.
Rated 8 out of 10 based on 6 votes.
Print Article
Email Article