Windows Automatic Reboots After Update

      by Wyatt Walter

All right all you Linux haters, listen up. You no longer have the right to tell me that Linux is hard to use because you have to drop to a command line to do “simple tasks”. I was working in a Windows XP virtual machine today and had the machine automatically reboot due to some updates being installed. I was in the middle of a project and was flipping back and forth. At one point I didn’t go back into my Windows session for some time and just as I got there I saw the dialog box go away wondering if I wanted to reboot. Ugh. I just missed it. So.. here I am. Working on a project, changing nothing when the OS just decided “it’s okay, I’ll just reboot now, he won’t know”. Except I did. The one thing that I hate about virtual machines is you can’t kick them without affecting others. Okay, so maybe I won’t kick my machines, but seriously.. it can’t just stay on?

When the machine came back up I decided to turn that “feature” off. After all, Windows is so much easier to configure, right? I couldn’t find anything in the “Automatic Updates” configuration, so I hit Google. I found this page on how to disable the automatic reboots and prompts. The post is quite old but so far I haven’t found any newer solutions (I was using XP, not sure how Vista handles this) and there are comments dating up until 2008. Looks like one can either stop the Windows Update service and modify the group policy or change a registry setting. Really? Just to keep my computer from shutting off in the middle of a project, I have to modify the registry or change the group policy? Now, I’ll admit, things are harder than they should be in every OS (yes, including Linux and Mac and many others), but I want to hear nothing about how Windows is so much easier to accomplish simple tasks. Like, you know.. staying on..

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Jan 22nd, 2009

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