It happens to all of us. Your working away on something really important – for me it is a few thousand lines of code. The phone rings you talk. Talk some more. Come back and – Ta Da! All your work is gone and your system is rebooted! Later you discover that it was the trusty Microsoft automatic updates.
Sure we all want to be patched to the hilt – but come on! Blow my work away to get it on there as fast as possible!
This ‘feature’ (Not sure I would call it that!) is easy to disable. You can create a new registry key here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU
Create a new DWORD value under this key called: NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers and set it to the number one. Reboot and you are ready to go.
Oh yea. For the lazy types (Thats me) we wrote a little proggy that will do it for you:
A final note – if you are on a corporate network and a group policy is in place this will have no effect – ha – you weren’t supposed to do this anyway ;()