Forum Discussion
Another unwanted automatic reboot!
Unfortunately, it happened again. Despite the registry hacks and YouTube research (a LOT of hits!), I still got rebooted last night and I had applications running that update disk files. As these were cached, now I'm left with corrupted files and a recovery procedure. This event has caused lost time and much, much frustration. C'mon Microsoft!!! Do us a favor and stop automatically rebooting the system. I suspect this action is for the benefit of the casual user, who probably doesn't know better, but give us advanced users a break. At least provide an option to NOT AUTOMATICALLY REBOOT!! A reminder that update were applied and a reboot is needed (which we receive) is fine but DON'T AUTOMATICALLY REBOOT!!
3 Replies
The issue is that Microsoft has changed how these settings work over time. The old "No auto-restart with logged on users" setting was very powerful, but Microsoft has de-emphasized it in favor of "Active Hours" . However, as you discovered, Active Hours has a hard limit (a maximum of 18 hours) and can't protect long-running overnight tasks like renders or compiles.
Thanks for your contribution Daniolle. However, I am running Windows 11 HOME Edition, and I do not have "Configure Automatic Updates". I can only PAUSE updates.
If you want total control over when updates download AND install, Windows 11 Pro allows you to set updates to "Notify to download and notify to install":
Using Group Policy:
- Navigate to the same Windows Update policy location
- Find "Configure Automatic Updates"
- Set it to Enabled, then under "Options" select 2 - Notify for download and auto install (or 2 - Notify to download and notify to install depending on version)
This means Windows will ask permission before even downloading updates. You can approve them on your own schedule.
