How can I permanently stop windows 10 from rebooting for updates?

[pctechforhire]

Are you people still whining about a reboot that happens ONCE A BLOODY MONTH?!?

Talk about first world problems... yikes. Patch your crap!

Wow, ok. For my clients, sure, let it reboot once a month. No problem. But for ME, it's about finding my computer has rebooted and now all of my programs and tabs and everything I had running is now gone. For ME, it's about controlling how and when the reboot takes place. My systems ARE patched, but on MY schedule. I would rather gracefully shut everything down that is running and gracefully bring it back up. Microsofts forced reboot doesn't allow for that. So, yes, I would love to find a permanent way to prevent MS from rebooting MY system.

Also, this can be a problem for clients, as well. Even MS may allow Windows 10 home users to pause updates soon. Automatic reboots is a problem. And I understand MS is trying to get the typical home user to update their systems more regularly. But they haven't, yet, found the right balance. And we techs are a different beast altogether. We (I) want control over everything. So, again, yes, I would love to find a permanent way to prevent MS from rebooting my system.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Wow, ok. For my clients, sure, let it reboot once a month. No problem. But for ME, it's about finding my computer has rebooted and now all of my programs and tabs and everything I had running is now gone. For ME, it's about controlling how and when the reboot takes place. My systems ARE patched, but on MY schedule. I would rather gracefully shut everything down that is running and gracefully bring it back up. Microsofts forced reboot doesn't allow for that. So, yes, I would love to find a permanent way to prevent MS from rebooting MY system.

Also, this can be a problem for clients, as well. Even MS may allow Windows 10 home users to pause updates soon. Automatic reboots is a problem. And I understand MS is trying to get the typical home user to update their systems more regularly. But they haven't, yet, found the right balance. And we techs are a different beast altogether. We (I) want control over everything. So, again, yes, I would love to find a permanent way to prevent MS from rebooting my system.

No, they aren't trying to get home users to update their crap, they are trying to get EVERYONE to update their crap. I've got a ticket board full of "professional" machines that cannot talk to Server 2016 RDS clusters because they don't have an RDP v10 client installed. That means Windows 7 or Windows 8 OVER A YEAR WITHOUT UPDATES!

Second Wednesday of every month, update your junk, restart, move on. It's like a clock, and you shouldn't need to leave applications running all night, and if you do, go click the stupid pause button. And yes, sometimes there's an out of band patch that's really critical, we just had one around Christmas! Reboot again, it's not hard.

All of this energy only furthers the reality of unpatched systems. This is basically the technological equivalent of the anti-vax movement... knock it off. There will be no permanent solution, ever. Nor should there be.

Ok, well there is a solution... unplug from the Internet, problem solved.

 

[pctechforhire]

No, they aren't trying to get home users to update their crap, they are trying to get EVERYONE to update their crap. I've got a ticket board full of "professional" machines that cannot talk to Server 2016 RDS clusters because they don't have an RDP v10 client installed. That means Windows 7 or Windows 8 OVER A YEAR WITHOUT UPDATES!

Second Wednesday of every month, update your junk, restart, move on. It's like a clock, and you shouldn't need to leave applications running all night, and if you do, go click the stupid pause button. And yes, sometimes there's an out of band patch that's really critical, we just had one around Christmas! Reboot again, it's not hard.

All of this energy only furthers the reality of unpatched systems. This is basically the technological equivalent of the anti-vax movement... knock it off. There will be no permanent solution, ever. Nor should there be.

Ok, well there is a solution... unplug from the Internet, problem solved.

Again, wow. I'm not sure anyone said anything about it being hard or unnecessary or that MS is trying to get just home users to update. I, personally, have several VMs going all the time to perform various tasks. When MS forces a reboot on me, all of my VMs crash. There ARE good reasons to want to disable the nightmare of auto reboots. It's fine if you don't have a reason to. But the rest of us will find a permanent solution to the problem.

 

[Sky-Knight]

Again, wow. I'm not sure anyone said anything about it being hard or unnecessary or that MS is trying to get just home users to update. I, personally, have several VMs going all the time to perform various tasks. When MS forces a reboot on me, all of my VMs crash. There ARE good reasons to want to disable the nightmare of auto reboots. It's fine if you don't have a reason to. But the rest of us will find a permanent solution to the problem.

No, there is no good reason to halt updates, if your workflow requires that you need to change your work flow. If you have a situation where you need updates to pause, you manually pause them during the project. That's why you have a pause switch in your update settings on a machine. Again, this thinking is how and why we have unpatched units everywhere. Everyone thinks I'm special, I'm smart, I don't have to do this right now... I'm fine!

NO... you are not fine... You're an anti-vaxer, and you're making everyone else sick.

 

[Porthos]

I, personally, have several VMs going all the time to perform various tasks

I think you are using a desktop OS when you should be using a server OS so that you control updates and restarts.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I, personally, have several VMs going all the time to perform various tasks. When MS forces a reboot on me, all of my VMs crash. There ARE good reasons to want to disable the nightmare of auto reboots.

Might be an example of not choosing the right hypervisor. For most of my clients who want ease of managing the servers for some in-house staff, smaller businesses enjoy Microsoft Hyper-V not only for the low cost, but having a literal console in front of them to easily log in and do stuff. The catch is...now 'n then even that hypervisor host needs updates and a reboot. So that's something to be aware of going in. And even then, you can control "when" on a server.

For clients that cannot afford regular downtime for updates/ reboots, larger server setups with many guests, we use VMWare for the hypervisor. This way we can have lower impact on the clients production by staggering updates on the servers just 1 or 2 at a time...instead of having the hyper-visor hosts reboot for updates and drop 6 or 10 servers for a while.

 

[Sky-Knight]

...instead of having the hyper-visor hosts reboot for updates and drop 6 or 10 servers for a while.

It wouldn't be so bad if Microsoft could get the updates times into something reasonable, but Server 2016 can take HOURS, even on fast SSD equipped systems. It's almost bad enough that I'm wanting to walk away from Microsoft for the hypervisor role. It's never fun asking people to be patient because the host decided to crank itself over at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon and half the office that's working until 6pm is just sitting there twiddling thumbs.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

No, there is no good reason to halt updates, if your workflow requires that you need to change your work flow. If you have a situation where you need updates to pause, you manually pause them during the project. That's why you have a pause switch in your update settings on a machine. Again, this thinking is how and why we have unpatched units everywhere. Everyone thinks I'm special, I'm smart, I don't have to do this right now... I'm fine!

NO... you are not fine... You're an anti-vaxer, and you're making everyone else sick.

My situation was that I did reboot for updates and then after they were installed it decided to do yet another reboot. The system should never reboot without my authority.

 

[Sky-Knight]

My situation was that I did reboot for updates and then after they were installed it decided to do yet another reboot. The system should never reboot without my authority.

By default if an admin is logged in, reboots are paused. The system will only restart if you held off on those updates for over a week.

There are a few exceptions, when MS marks an update as emergency. But there have only been 3-4 of those in the history of Windows 10 that I'm aware of.

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

By default if an admin is logged in, reboots are paused. The system will only restart if you held off on those updates for over a week.

I was logged in as an admin, so you think i had a few updates to do and it needed to reboot before it could install another one and since that one was a week old it force rebooted?

 

[Sky-Knight]

I was logged in as an admin, so you think i had a few updates to do and it needed to reboot before it could install another one and since that one was a week old it force rebooted?

Yes, either your machine fell behind for some reason, and the update couldn't be rolled into the current CU which... does happen but it's relatively uncommon. Or, the current CU you got had an emergency update to fix something else that either the CU broke, or a new bug that MS flagged as an emergency. The former happens a fair bit if you're in the semi-annual (targeted) channel, the latter has only happened 4-5 times that I'm aware of in the history of Windows 10.

So if you're using Win 10 Pro, for professional things as you should, make sure you're in the semi-annual channel, because otherwise you're just asking to be in the beta channel. And Home edition is stuck there, which is why I never recommended it. That's just asking for headaches!

In general however you should expect only 14 or so reboots a year on Win10! I mean... remember XP? That thing was daily or worse... Win 98... every 8 hours or so?