Vista knows when you should reboot

This is nothing new, and there are literally thousands of posts and articles on this subject, but I want to add more fuel to the fire.

Last night I had several large Photoshop mockups open. I was working late and figured I might as well leave them open and continue in the morning. I do this a lot at home, although I do save before leaving. I know leaving your computer on can pose a security risk, but I like living on the edge.

Anyway, I walk in this morning and of course I have a login screen. Log in and nothing is open. Windows Vista has performed an update. Although you are prompted with a countdown to cancel, which in itself can become annoying as it keeps popping up even after you have postponed it, I think this is a crazy default. What if I was crunching some numbers over night, running network connections, or took a bathroom break with unsaved work on the screen. Well Vista would think that it’s time to force reboot and I would lose whatever important things I was doing.

Here is how you can disable this silly default.

1. In your start menu search field type gpedit.msc
2. Click your way to Local Computer Policy -> Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update.
3. Double click “No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations.
4. Click Enable .

There are some other interesting settings in here and you can read their descriptions on the left hand side when you click on them. You will need to reboot in order for this to take effect of course.