Ohlamon’s Technology News Blog

How to disable that really boring “asking confirmation for everything” Windows Vista behavior?

You can get rid of the confirmation by disabling UAC(User Account Control). The problem is that this will disable most of the Windows Vista’s new security features, so be careful with what are you doing.

• Go to Control Panel.
• Click Admin Tools.
• Click System Config.
• Click Tools.
• Disable UAC.

Microsoft introduced new feature with its SP2. It will automatically reboot your computer after installing updates. If you do not restart your computer after updating it you get the popup that just asks you “restart now or later”, but after a day or so it starts coming up with the popup that has a 5 minute timer. If you do not see the popup within the 5 minutes, it will restart itself. Of course you could disable the updates, but this is not a good solution in this way.

So question is: How to disable this auto-restart feature?

Solution from Microsoft (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555444)

Go to registry editor and navigate to the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\Policies \Microsoft\Windows \WindowsUpdate\AU

Change the “NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers” DWord value to the required number.

0 = False (Allow auto-reboot)
1 = True (Disallow auto-reboot)

Solution if you have WindowsXP Pro

* In the Start Menu go to Run type “gpedit.msc” and press Enter
* Now a Group Policy editor will open. In this window navigate to: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Template -> Windows Components -> Windows Update
* Double click on No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations
* In the settings window Choose Enabled and click OK
* Close Group Policy Editor

So, It is no more auto-restatrs, but we still have that annoying “Restart Now/Restart Later” dialog popping up every 5 minutes

There are two ways to deal with it.

1. With this registry change you can set frequency of this dialog appearanse from 5 minutes to 24 hours.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
“RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled”=dword:00000001
“RebootRelaunchTimeout”=dword:000005a0
“NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers”=dword:00000001

2. Go to Control Panel->Administrative Tools-Services. Scroll down the list to the item “Automatic Updates”. Right-click that item and choose “Stop”.
Another way to do so just go to Start->Run and then type “net stop wuauserv” in the box and press Enter.