Created in early 2004, UNEASYsilence aims to deliver daily coverage of offbeat & generally geeky news. Subscribe via RSS or Email.

READING single

Get rid of that “Restart Now” dialog box

Posted in Geeky, Tech by Dan at 2:01 pm
closeThis post was published 3 years 4 months 27 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.

Windows is quite the nagger. Do this, Restart Now, Save Later… BLAH BLAH BLAH. However if you IGNORE it’s restart dialog warnings Windows will do you the favor and restart on its own, closing all your important documents. Time to take control back! With this hack you can tell Windows how often to nag you (default is 10 minutes), or to turn off the nag entirely. SCORE!

Now, to get rid of it:
Start / Run / gpedit.msc / Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations

You can configure how often it will nag you (I re-configured it for 720 minutes, which means I’ll be asked twice on a work day), or completely disable it.

Oh, I almost forgot: this setting is only loaded when Windows starts, so a reboot is needed. If that stupid dialog is on your screen now, just stop the “Automatic Updates” service (but keep it as Automatic, so it gets reloaded on the next start) and you won’t see it again.[via]

6 Responses to “Get rid of that “Restart Now” dialog box”

  1. David says:
    6/27/2006 at 3:10 pm

    This is only for XP Pro…

  2. Charles Jones says:
    6/27/2006 at 10:35 pm

    Or just do a ‘net stop wuauserv’ and a ‘net start wuauserv’ and no reboot is needed.

  3. Peter says:
    6/28/2006 at 5:02 am

    David is right – gpedit.msc does not exist on XP Home.

    However, Windows XP Home users can switch off the nag by saving the following as a .reg file then choose to merge it:

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
    “RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled”=dword:00000000
    “NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers”=dword:00000001

    (Thanks to a comment at http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000294.html by Squeegee)

  4. Tom Shakely says:
    6/29/2006 at 10:41 pm

    What a fantastic tip! Thanks very much.

  5. PVL says:
    11/18/2006 at 7:51 pm

    To avoid the restart, hit Win+R (or Start>Run) and type “gpupdate.exe /force” (w/o the quotes obv.) This should force the settings to take place.

  6. PVL says:
    11/18/2006 at 7:52 pm

    The max is 1440 minutes (which is one day).

Additional comments powered by BackType