Jim Walton on Church Tech Matters highlights an aspect of Windows that nags a lot of people - the automatic reminder to restart after installing Windows Updates that need a reboot:

My issue is every few minutes I get the popup window prompting me to restart and I don’t want to restart. It will disrupt everything I am doing. I will restart later, but not now. The default for ‘Restart Now’ is N and the default for Restart Later is L, and that is basically backwards from what we are used to. N is generally used to say No, I’ll do it later, but in this case, if I press N when it pops up, I’m shutting down.

I know that this annoys a LOT of people so let me offer you a fix!

Click Start > Run and type:

gpedit.msc

In Group Policy Editor navigate:

Select Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations and if you right-click and choose Properties and click Enabled you can set an interval that has to expire before you are hassled about restarting again.  Click OK when you're done.

Through Group Policy Editor you can also disable auto-restart by setting No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installation (set to Enabled) but I don't recommend this.

No more nags!

This entry was posted on Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 21:12 and is filed under PC Doctor Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.