I cannot thank you enough. My morning bootup takes several minutes and consists of over a dozen apps I use throughout the day…this thing was a nightmare when it forced me to reboot after all of them had loaded!
Does Jeff Atwood’s method really work. Because I wanna try it.
Does anyone know what to monitor so that I will know when a server is prompting for a reboot? Is there any registry key or polling of events? Anything?
You could always set windows updates to download updates and then prompt you to install them, that way you could install the updates when you are ready to reboot, rather than installing them while you are still working with windows.
Ya know. I really hat IT fascist who push Group Policy dictates on users – like insisting on 10 minute restart NAGS on an Automatic updates. Central planning and control for the lose.
I wouldnt most IT Droids near my PC let alone dictate important update installation and restart policies. Theyre more likely to format the hard disk in response to service call than solve any problem. One random MS Certification and they think they know better than the PC’s owner.
You guys are all whinning idiots…and should thank your lucky stars that there are IT guys that control your computers because if it was up to the bunch of you…your computers would be devastated by all the crap floating out on the WAN (for you lamos that don’t know WAN -it is the Internet)
There are 20,000 PCs in the organization, all inside the corporate firewalls. There are zero-day exploits that allow worms, remote control of your system, wipe data–whatever. MS released its excuse for a patch to stop that and the patch was pushed last night. 20,000 PCs are now protected, as soon as they reboot. 1000 people in the org are waaaaaaay too busy to reboot; they’d rather spend a half-hour searching the web for ways to disable the nag screen.
Your buddy in the next cube didn’t want to reboot either. He has an aircard and needs to get past the firewall to get his POP3 email. He disconnected from the network and fired up the aircard. (He didn’t like what the software firewall was doing on his PC so he disabled that service long ago.) Whoops–he’s infected! Doesn’t know it, of course. Now he needs his corp email, so off goes the aircard and back on the network.
Bummer that a lot of the folks didn’t reboot. Congratulations! Now over 1000 PCs are infected, “My Documents” wiped, and all need to be reimaged. Massive downtime. The developers upstairs are screaming because they’ll miss their deadlines. How could IT allow such a thing to happen???
Oops!!!
Just because you can design an engine doesn’t mean you know how to drive. The above scenario happens all the time to differing degrees.; I’ve personally seen it 6 times.
We’ll be glad to drop everything and get you working again. You’re 999th on the list.
I’m a coder too. I hate it, but I’ve seen both sides. Stop whining and reboot the damned computer.
I’m cursed over here. I cannot execute the command gpedit.msc or gpedit. It’s simply not recognized as a command. Has Windows implemented actual road blocks to stop our control of Windows? Who the hell do they think they are thinking security is so damned important that they’ll crash our system and everything on it to fix it?
Also I’m curious if it can’t close down if you leave a file unsaved.
Okay so I cannot access gpedit.msc for home as I just found but I am still skilled at other ways which I will share for others who like laziness as I.
Goto notepad either in Accessories or run notepad, and type in
net stop “automatic updates”
Then save it as “disable updates.bat.” Put that file on your desktop and just double click it. Alls I see is that this file will be on my desktop for a loooong time.
LONG LIVE THE PROGRAMMER!
Death to Microsoft!
For all of you who want to disable Windows Updates dot the following:
click start - run - services.msc (win2000 and winxp)
Right click Automatic Updates and select stop
Right click Automatic Update and select properties - select startup type arrow - select disabled.
Also change your administrator password to "password"
If you are using a router connected to your broadband cable modem - disconnect your router and directly connect your pc to your cable modem.
Post your current IP Address on this blog by going to start - run type cmd - ipconfig -all and your all set…
IT Dorks:
You guys are responsible for fixing and controlling your corporate environment. You do that by not allowing users to even have the rights in the first place to modify group policies. Don’t get angry at information dissemination, that is ignorant behavior and borders on mental retardation.
For the rest of us, this is good information. Use it at your own risk. Don’t violate your company policies if they have policies in place. Tell your IT dorks to fix your computer so you can’t accidently or maliciously violate your company policies.
IT Dorks, if you’re so angry about users doing stuff you should have locked down long ago, I’ve heard Burger King is hiring. “Ding, fries are done.”
OMG THANK YOU.
That god damn dialogue box was doing my head in.
Finally I can sort it out.
The following command line commands will stop and disable Windows Firewall / Internet Connection Sharing, Automatic Updates, Windows Time, and Messenger.
netsh firewall set opmode disable
net stop sharedaccess
SC CONFIG sharedaccess start= disabled
net stop wuauserv
SC CONFIG wuauserv start= disabled
net stop "Windows Time"
SC CONFIG W32time start= disabled
net stop "Messenger"
SC CONFIG Messenger start= disabled
net stop "Wireless Zero Configuration"
SC CONFIG WZCSVC start= disabled
Dave’s method doesn’t work on xp home
great, great man!
That thing 's been bugging me forever. Thanks for having this tutorial online!.
You may find the following page useful:
I suspect it may even work on Win XP Home.
In my case I did not have the two required reg keys so editing Group Policy did not help me much. I had to add two DWORD values to AU (see above) registry
RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled 1
RebootRelaunchTimeout (decimal: 1440)
someone probably has already said that somewhere here - so I am sorry if I am repeating the information.
Thanks
Jasiek
I’ve wondered about this myself. thanks for the info. works for home and pro. very helpful.
BUT… there is one important item that is missing. all you who are complaining about this thing… and who can’t seem to find 30 secs to reboot your machine… whats wrongw ith you? See i’m the IT Director of my company. I had an employee complain about this.
“I’m SO MAD. i left for lunch and the report i’ve been working on is gone cause my computer restarted”
ok… some messure of this is valid but most is not. so what if your computer restarted. that shouldn’t have effected you. you were at lunch. and sence no reasonable person would work on there computer on anything that even remotely important with out saving the file every once in a while. this is a none issue.
extreem example is the retard on here who said he went on vacation with a Database he was working on still open. ok … HELLO… i can see you going to the copier and didnt save… but you left for VACATION and didnt save your work before you went…??? why the heck not?? anything remotely important there are many saves i will make. “mydatabaseproject verison before vacation.dbx”
what if we had a poweroutage… or the power company cut your power insteed of your neighbors… or a tree fell on your lines… anything could happen you dont leave an important document open with out saving it.
Solutions is simple follow directions above. set timmer to a long value. save work when you goto lunch. click start restart. it will install what it needs and you leave for lunch. you come back you log in. you open your saved document and no more message popping up. SIMPLE. SAVBE YOUR STINKING WORK.
This is on WinXP Professional, SP2.
Well, I ran that “gpedit.msc” and set “Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations” to 1440 (24 hours), but the stupid dialog kept popping up every ten minutes still.
Then I read that you need to restart the group policy service, or get it to update itself by running gpupdate.exe, which I then ran. However, it says that this sometimes doesn’t work and still won’t make these settings take effect, which it did NOT in my case, because the stupid dialog kept coming up.
I also noticed that gpupdate.exe running had changed my settings for setting the automatic reboot after the automatic update from “Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them.” back to “Automatic (recommended)”. So I re-ran my .reg file to set this back again:
REGEDIT4
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; Registry script to make Windows Automatic Update not automatically
; reboot the computer after installing updates
; Date: 28-Nov-2006
; OS: Windows XP Professional, SP2 build 2600 (v5.1.2600)
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
; This is usually set to 4, meaning automatically reboot.
;
; After running this .reg script, goto “Control Panel-Automatic Updates”
; and the dialog’s radio button should be set on
; “Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them.” (3)
; instead of
; “Automatic (recommended)” (4).
“AUOptions”=dword:3
Anyway, last night when I left work I had the stupid nag window still appearing, so I think I just let it sit there and moved it below my toolbar.
This morning, I came in and my machine had been rebooted and there was the little icon in the system tray that said “You’re machine has been automatically rebooted after a windows update.”
I just checked, and my machine is still set to “Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them”, so I don’t know what happened.
Thanks!
It was great to get rid of it!
windows installer keep saying(prepairing to install )can someone please help.