So as usual this posting relates closely to another post I made, but this is slightly more important as this relates to the message we all get after installing updates where windows basically forcefully makes us restart our computer. Usually this annoying little message will appear when we are in the middle of ten million things that are going on around about us and have an urgent requirement to actually get a specific task done. We have all been there…..

 

Now this message is all ok most of the time, apart from when windows decides enough is enough and gives us 5 minutes before it automatically shuts itself down. Now there are ways to stop it and remove this type of behaviour, however the prompt will still appear. But the good part is that the functionality to completely shut down the machine automatically will be removed.

 

As far as I am aware this trick will work in all versions of windows.

 

The modification itself is pretty straightforward, we are relying again on basic user ability to be able to use regedit.

 

First step is to launch regedit and you will want to navigate to the following key entry:

 

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU

 

Then inside this location you will need to create a new 32-bit DWORD and name it NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers and give it a value of 1. This will prevent any type of automatic reboot scripts running while any users are logged in.

Obviously removing this custom variable will put things back to the way they were before, but going on the fact you want to remove the functionality I doubt that will happen any time soon.

 

All that is left to do is reboot your machine, and that’s it – all the changes will have taken place during the reboot and your computer should now no longer automatically reboot, especially when you don’t want it to – happy days!!