Windows 10: How to Prevent automatic restart in Windows 10 Anniversary Update?

Tairiku: Your version of Windows 10 is Windows Pro X64 - and with the pro version it's my clear understanding you can control when/if updates are installed. It's the vast majority of us with the Home versions who are seeking a cure for controlling untimely forced update restarts.

 

You can modify tasks in Home version and some policies via registry, it is a group policy console, which is unavailable.

 

Just a quick question; How does the restart scheduling during "inactive hours" work? As I understand, when it downloads an update, it schedules a restart for some time during active hours and warns you with an unobtrusive notification bubble that disappears in a few seconds (easily missed if you're not at your computer). In the windows update settings, an option to reschedule the upcoming restart. How soon is the restart scheduled for?

Am I safe if I just check every day or so whether an update has been scheduled, or am I at constant risk of restarts outside active hours?

 

This should be working, select to block shutdown: Don't Sleep 3.91 Prevent Shutdown, Stand By, Turn Off, Restart

 

THANKS!! I have it in my systray, and will just turn off my monitor when I don't want it permanently glaring at me. ...

 

Each time it tries to restart, it checks the active hours. If it is trying to restart during those hours, it reschedules to a time outside of those hours, something like 30 minutes after the active hours are over. You could actually keep manually extending the active hours around the clock whenever it gets close to restarting if you wanted to.

 

Re "DontSleep": When I initiate a restart, the message is "Closing 1 app and restarting. Below that, Logo with "Don't Sleep" shows with message: "This app is preventing you from restarting". Yet another option below that: "Restart anyway", which completes successfully when I choose that option.

I believe our increasingly invasive Windows Nanny will override "Don'tSleep" and force a restart when installing updates, thus making "Don'tSleep" ineffective.

Also, sadly, the custom restart time under "Restart options" is greyed out, only becomes active when there's a pending update. Which, of course, is difficult to know since there may or may not be an update notification in the teensy notification area in our desktop system trays. I was actually sitting at my computer when the last notice came in around 1:30 AM, it flashed at me and then vanished, not to be seen again even in the notification area. So I panicked, scheduled my next restart for 4:00 AM.

That's when I found out the option, "automatically finish setting up my device after an update" does not work. I had that option checked, but my computer was left where it always is after any restart: login page which needs my password. Thus any scheduled tasks between the update restart and later manual login were lost.

Agreed: Updates are important! But Windows 10's overbearing maintainance is a DISASTER!! Inadequate, poorly thought out, poorly written, poorly described "one size fits all" software created for the ease and convenience of Microsoft employees rather than the needs of consumers. They need to fix the broken stuff and give us a banner with a countdown clock for pending restarts. Then we'll actually be INFORMED and can hit "restart" when we choose within the timeframe. (But if I go on vacation, I'll definitely use my Win7 box to schedule future tv recordings without worrying about coming home to a computer which has long been frozen at the login stage.)

 

Don't sleep is unable to prevent auto restart yesterday.

Yesterday, I have this update that required a restart and my PC still auto restarted
Cumulative Update for Windows 10 Version 1607 for x64-based systems (KB3194798)

Update: I have explained what happened in detail in another post: A possible solution to stop Win10 from auto-rebooting after updates. - Windows 10 Forums

 

Do you have shutting apps down disabled? Otherwise, it will be unable to hung the system.

reg add "HKCU\Control Panel\Desktop" /v "AutoEndTasks" /t REG_SZ /d "0" /f

 

I have been having this same problem. It's been doing my head in. What a ridiculous 'feature' MS have incorporated. I tried changing registry and policy settings but still restarting. However, I just realised... Would stopping the Windows Update Service in services.msc not prevent it even from looking for updates? It would need stopping every time Windows was started I think but for those of use who keep PC on for days or more at a time that wouldn't be too much of a bind anyway. I'm going to try it. Fingers crossed...

 

I found another thread ( A possible solution to stop Win10 from auto-rebooting after updates. - Windows 10 Forums ) which has a task scheduler fix which works. It continually creates "tasks" within the time frame Windows won't force a restart. So I searched for and found a little .exe program called "NoJiggle" which should basically do the same thing. Keeps Windows from entering the idle state. Since screen savers or sleep are then disabled, I'll have to turn off my monitor when I don't want it glaring at me. Hope I've successfully put it into my startup folder so it'll re-activate after restarts - (hopefully restarts I have initiated instead of Win10 forced restarts.)

 

I wonder if you could defer update indefinitely by identifying where in the registry the active hours are stored and having a scheduled task that updates them automatically to keep moving the window forward ...

 

Yeah, I suspect that it would work.

 

Well, only one way to find out ... I tracked down the registry entries, and I've created three scheduled tasks that use C:\Windows\System32\REG.EXE to update the window. Kind of brute-forced it this way, but it's good for a test. Every 8 hours a task runs that establishes a new 10 hours window, using these parameters:

ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX\Settings /v ActiveHoursStart /t REG_DWORD /f /d 1
ADD HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX\Settings /v ActiveHoursEnd /t REG_DWORD /f /d 11

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/4...a.html#option2

The value after /d is the new hour for that key. It'd be more elegant to write a script that can run at anytime and set a window based on the current hour, and that's actually kind of necessary because a shutdown of any significant length could push you outside the defined window and allow a reboot not too long after you came back up (but hopefully you would've been updated then anyway!)

Now the wait for a critical update that tries to force a reboot ...

 

I could be missing something, but I don't see how this works, because that just sets the active hours to 1am-11am. Instead, it needs to be relative to whatever time the UpdateOrchestrator->Reboot scheduled task is set to reboot the machine at. It always needs to keep that time within the active hours window, so that whenever Windows runs the Reboot scheduled task, it discovers that it is trying to do so within the active hours (after which, Windows reschedules Reboot to a new time in the future, just outside of the active hours window).

So, you need to be checking when the Reboot scheduled task is meant to run, and update the active hours accordingly.