Restart your computer to finish installing important updates

While the automatic update function in Windows XP and Vista is a good way to keep your system up to date with the latest patches it has the nasty habit to nag the user after downloading the patches to the computer. I suppose everyone has received a message that asks the user if he wants to reboot now or reboot later in XP or the dialog box that asks you to restart your computer to finish installing important updates in Windows Vista.

Both do not give the user a choice to reboot the computer when he wants to do it. XP nags him every ten minutes if he chooses reboot later while Vista has a maximum of four hours before the user is asked again. I’m not sure why Microsoft decided to not give the user the chance to reboot the computer when he wants to in this situation but it is surely annoying as hell.

There is hope, however. If you have access to Group Policy in XP you can go to Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update and enable the option “No auto-restart for schedule Automatic Updates installations“.

I was not able to verify if this option is available in Windows Vista as well. If it is you could simply turn it on there as well and reboot the system whenever you like after downloading the patches. If someone running Windows Vista could verify this it would be really helpful.

Another option would be to simply stop the automatic update service in the current session. This would mean that the nagging screens asking you to reboot would not appear in this session only. Automatic Updates will be started automatically as a service again after a reboot.

To stop the Automatic Updating Service type net stop "automatic updates" in the command line.