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Automatic Updates Are Automatically Painful

by Aaron Smith on Friday, March 16 2007

Don't get me wrong -- we strongly encourage automatic updates. In fact, for beginner users, I set it up to install automatically, and restart automatically if necessary. But I'm not a beginner user, and more often than not, the "Do you want to restart your computer now?" prompt actually minimizes my productivity. Not only does the prompt pop up every 10 minutes or so, but it also steals focus, and the default button is to restart. I often have at least 8 to 10 apps running, doing multiple things, and if I'm typing away, and the automatic updates restart dialog pops up right when I press ENTER, I'm scrambling to get everything saved before the OS shuts down. That happens more often than you might think, and it's an source of incredible frustration. I don't want to turn off automatic updates, but I also don't want it to control my life. The solution, I found, is a nice compromise between letting automatic updates notify me that I need to restart, and letting me choose when that's going to happen. Here's what to do:

  1. Run gpedit.msc from the run dialog
  2. Navigate to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update
  3. TAB over to the list of option, select "Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations," and press ENTER
  4. Arrow down to Enabled
  5. TAB to the restart (minutes) edit box, and enter in a value greater than 10. I set mine to 720 (12 hours). That means, if I do get prompted during the day, I can chose to restart or not. If I get prompted while I'm not at work, I don't care, and the machine is free to reboot.
  6. TAB to OK, press ENTER, then close the Group Policy editor
If you're running XP Home, then this trick won't work, because I don't believe XP Home has the Group Policy editor. When I discovered this solution, I was already being prompted by the restart dialog, so I had to kill the Automatic Updates service to keep it from coming up. The service is still set to automatic, though, so the next time I reboot, it will restart. Now I have control over Automatic Updates, and can finally get back to being productive.

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