Friday, February 16, 2007

Automatic updates bugging you to restart?

Getting tired of having to click away the restart later button every 10 minutes when there is an update? 
I was,  and after some searching I found a solution on the internet,
you can't turn it off, but you can make it appear only once a day 

(that way you can shut down at the end of the day and the next day the reboot is done, 
when you boot the computer)

press Start, run
type in gpedit.msc
at the left side of the screen,  under the Local Computer Policy, choose Administrative Templates,   Windows Components, Windows Update

at the right side of the screen, doubleclick  Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations

You can disable it (Thanks to Charles : disabled means the default 10 minutes.),
or put a value in the enable field, I put it at the maximum value : 1440, so it will only bug me once per day.

Unfortunatly, this is only active when windows restarts, so you may still have the annoying screen for the moment.

To get rid of that temporarily :
press start, run, services.msc

then right click the Automatic Updates service en choose 'stop', it will now stop bugging you :)
(it is best to leave it at automatic, so it will restart when you reboot your pc, and the other 'fix' is active)

I could only test this on a Windows XP Professional with SP2, 
I don't think the home version has the gpedit.msc tool. If I find something for that I will post it.

Edit: This also works in Vista Ultimate (I tested it on the X64 Ultimate edition), but Vista lets you select to notify only every 4 hours
 

No comments: