Prevent Windows Update from Forcibly Rebooting Your Computer

We’ve all been at our computer when the Windows Update dialog pops up and tells us to reboot our computer. I’ve become convinced that this dialog has been designed to detect when we are most busy and only prompt us at that moment.

The real problem comes into play when Windows gets tired of reminding us and says that the computer is going to reboot in 5 minutes, and the only way you can prevent the inevitable is to temporarily disable Windows Update
.
There’s a couple of ways that we can disable this behavior, however. You’ll still get the prompt, but it won’t force you to shut down.

This trick should work for all versions of Windows as far as we know. You can always resort to the temporary disabling measures instead.

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search box or run dialog, and navigate down to the following key, creating new keys if they don’t exist.

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

Create a new 32-bit DWORD value named NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers and give it a value of 1 to prevent automatic reboot while users are logged on. Delete the value to put things back to the way they were.

Downloadable Registry Hack

Just download and extract the registry hack files and double-click on WUNoAutoReboot.reg to disable automatic reboots. The other script will remove the hack.

Download Registry

Using Auto Reboot Remover Utility

If you’d rather not mess with the registry, you can use a small utility created by the guys at Intelliadmin which will make the changes for you. Just make sure you right-click and run as administrator if you are using Vista.

Download 

Temporarily Disable Windows Update’s Automatic Reboot in Win7 or Vista

So you’re in the middle of doing something important on your computer when the “Restart your computer to finish installing important updates” dialog comes up, and asks you to restart your computer.

Sure, you can postpone it up to 4 hours, but then the dialog will just come up again. If you were downloading some important files you might not want the computer to reboot automatically.
The quick way to disable the reboot for the current session is to stop the Windows Update service from running. You can do this by opening an administrative mode command prompt.
Type cmd into the start menu search box, and use Ctrl+Shift+Enter to open in administrative mode. You could also right-click the item in the menu and choose Run as Administrator.

Once at the prompt, just type in the following:

net stop “windows update”

Don’t worry, the service will start right back up when you reboot your computer, but at least you don’t have to deal with the restart dialog.

Stop Windows Update from Hijacking the Sleep/Shutdown Button

As an avid user of the Sleep function on my laptop, I’ve been more than irritated with Windows 7 or Vista’s habit of changing the Sleep/Shutdown button into an “Install Updates and Shut Down” button whenever there are updates from Windows Update.
After the last time I accidentally clicked this stupid button when I just wanted to enter sleep mode, I decided to look for a solution.


Windows 7 does the same thing to my Shutdown button, and this same registry hack fixes the problem.

Manual Registry Hack
If you’d like to manually create this hack, you can open up regedit.exe using the start menu search box and then browse down to the following key, creating the key if it doesn’t exist.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU

Add a 32-bit DWORD value called NoAUAsDefaultShutdownOption with a value of 1. No reboot should be necessary.
Now our Sleep button should be back to the way it was, but if you wanted to use the Install Updates and Shut Down option, it’s still available via the shutdown menu:

Download Registry Hack
Unzip the file and double-click on the StopHijackingMySleepButton.reg file to activate the registry hack. You shouldn’t have to restart anything, as the changes will happen immediately. There’s also a registry file to uninstall the hack.
I believe there is a similar option for XP, but I’m guessing the key is located in a different place.

Download Registry

Disable All Notification Balloons in Windows 7 or Vista

    If you find the popup notification balloons in the Windows system tray to be too annoying, you might be interested to know that you can completely disable them. This would be an extreme option, of course… typically you can just turn them off in any offending applications, but if you want to disable them across the board, this is the solution.

This should work in any version of Windows.

      I’m not necessarily recommending that everybody do this… you should only bother with it if you need to solve this particular problem.

Manual Registry Hack

Open up regedit.exe through the start menu search or run box, and then browse down to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Right-click on the right-hand pane, and create a new 32-bit DWORD with the following values:

• Name: EnableBalloonTips
• Value: 0

You’ll have to logoff and back on in order to see the change… or to be more correct, you won’t see any popup balloons anymore.


Simply download, extract, and double-click on the DisableNotificationBalloons.reg file to enter the information into the registry. There’s also an included EnableNotificationBalloons file that will reverse the change.

DOWNLOAD REGISTRY 

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