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Comment by acuozzo | Hacker News Reader

My Windows 10 installation forcibly rebooted to install updates right in the middle of a 10+ hour overnight render.

I can't believe this is a thing. I recently switched back to Windows after deciding I wanted to play around with VR development (and honestly, get back into gaming) and was horrified to see a notice telling me my computer was going to reboot itself in one minute, with no way to abort.

I was right in the middle of something, and my first instinct was to Google how to stop the damn reboot. Of course, my computer was already rebooting by then.

I now know to turn on the setting to postpone updates for a month. But wow, I can't believe such unbelievably hostile UX is the out of the box experience.

(Also, side note, I'm pleasantly surprised at how robust and hassle free the Windows experience has otherwise become. I may even prefer this laptop to my MacBook, which I never thought I'd find myself thinking in a million years.)

Wait until you find out it's updating your motherboard BIOS/firmware (it tells you when it starts doing it!), and there's no way to stop it.

Not super great when the whole point of not upgrading to the latest BIOS was because it introduced a critical bug.

This only happens on Microsoft hardware though (or it is not Windows doing the update).

UEFI updates can now be delivered by vendors thru Windows Update now : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/br...

Good to know. But do any PC manufacturers do that in practice?

Not true. I only found out about this when my Acer laptop did it. :(

I just leave Final Fantasy 14 running in the background perpetually which stops windows from sleeping or running updates although it probably is helping kill the planet slightly faster as a result.

Personally, I'd prefer the system repeatedly prompt the user to restart to apply security updates (of which almost every update contains these days) instead of automatic restarts. It does try to apply those during what it believes are not "active hours", but it is not a perfect system.

Until that happens, consider setting your active hours manually in the Update & Security -> Windows Update settings panel. The update system is designed to avoid automatic restarts during active hours.

You can also pause updates for a period of time as well when you know that you don't want your system disrupted overnight.

I empathize with your frustration around the timing and I would encourage you to file feedback asking for more control over when updates happen.

Unfortunately, I often have renders that take way longer than 24 hours, so setting active hours wouldn't help much.

With that being said, I now have the box in question completely disconnected from the internet and I task it remotely via serial.

Update & security options can pause updates for 35 days at a time.

This should prevent automatic reboots: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/aavocr/after_6_mo...

To people that post this type of comment, do you not have qualms about announcing to the Internet that you repeatedly decline critical security updates for enough weeks that Windows forcibly installs them?

Pretty easy to fully disable updates.

Easy to do on a temporary basis but they will come back. I think even if you do 'sc delete wuauserv' it will eventually come back.

Don't do that on a computer you care about...

You can't do that anymore. You can pause updates for a while, but eventually it'll start again.

I did so via the registry, but my changes were reverted after updating.

"do you like this photo?" nooooo....

That's why you get Windows 10 Pro instead of Windows 10 Home.

It's a Windows 10 Pro installation.

Can you not schedule updates on Pro? Or change the option to not automatically reboot?

Not on mine in the UI, you can pause for 7 days or set hours to reboot during (but you need X hours per day that it can reboot during) but not have it disabled perpetually.

I did via the registry, but I later discovered that these changes reverted after updating.

I now have my render box completely disconnected from the internet and I task it remotely.

You can make it not reboot with group policies, not commonly known though - most people try the registry stuff which doesn't seem to work consistently. Been running Win10 Pro for a couple years, never had a single unwanted reboot, once went nearly a year without doing a single update.

Specifically, in group policy:

Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > "Configure Automatic Updates" and "No auto-restart with logged-on users for scheduled automatic update installations"

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