On a Windows Vista (and likely Win7) box the Windows Updates has gotten this nasty idea to automatically reboot your computer – if for some odd reason it feel like it, now where this may be useful in some sceneries I have had important video conversions disrupted by this exact behaviour.
If you happen to be looking at your pc while the update is in progress you will see a warning, stating that the computer will reboot in 10 min and you can then choose to delay this up to 4 hours, but if you have set a large conversion of video files in motion – then you are likely watching a good movie instead and will come back to a computer laughing at you via its loginscreen.
Anyhow, it’s a simple thing to fix once and for all, you just have to do a bit of registry tweaking;
Create this key;
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU
NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers=1
And Windows will behave after a reboot (that mean no more unscheduled reboots caused by Windows Updates)..
If you are lazy, then this blog offers a small utility to modify the registry for you 🙂
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/prevent-windows-update-from-forcibly-rebooting-your-computer/
Problem solved…