Net Industry

Asymptomatic : How to Disable that Blasted "Restart Now" Message from Windows Update

As commented on the blog entry above, the 'restart now' message returning every 15 minutes after running the windows update can be useful in some (very few) situations, for example grandma's never restarting their PC's...

Hey wait no grandma's always shut down their PC immediately after they're done playing solitaire... ehm ... no I'll get a reason later.

However, the Windows Update application doesn't seem to understand that if you don't click 'restart later' immediately, there might be a REASON for it, like running 3 virtual machines, and having to wait 1 hour before a workstation is back to the state it was before restarting.

Or for example a heavy load Windows 2003 Advanced server, Webserver or whatever server where a restart has to be planned very carefully to prevent the management from getting pissed, because yes, even there the lovely messagebox pops up.

I must add that the validaty of the "grandma" argument doesn't really count in a server environment, and if everything is all right, neither does the "help out people who don't know what they're doing" argument.

There are 2 checkboxes missing in this messagebox: don't show this annoying box this session again and don't show this annoying box ever again

I know it's not much, but here's an alternative to the first one:

• place this command in a batch file named 'GoAwayWindowsUpdate.bat':

• net stop wuauserv
  
  

beautiful...

Labels: Windows

posted by Wiebe Tijsma @ 3:38 PM