How to Disable Update Restart Notifications

Perhaps you’ve seen this annoying message in Windows XP SP1 or higher:

It’s Windows politely reminding you to restart your computer after applying some recent updates in the background. Useful, but really obnoxious because the refresh rate on this is under five minutes and it will continuously annoy you until you restart your computer.

To disable this obnoxious behavior, you can use the Group Policy Editor on your Local Machine.

1. Do a START, RUN.
2. Type in gpedit.msc, and hit ENTER.
3. The Group Policy Editor will load. The default object is the Local Computer Policy.
4. Select Computer Configuration.
5. Select Administrative Templates.
6. Select Windows Components.
7. Select Windows Update.
8. Select Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations.

Once doing this, the following dialog will be presented.

ENABLE it and set the time in minutes. Example, 240 minutes would be once every four hours – that’s not bad. You’d think the option DISABLE would work but it actually treats the policy option like a “Not Configured”.

Finally, you must force the Policy to take effect.

9. Make the change. Confirm okay.
10. Close the Group Policy Editor.
11. Do a START, RUN.
12. Type the following: gpupdate.exe /force
13. Press ENTER.

A DOS window will flash as the group policy is forced to take effect.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work on the HOME edition of XP. And a little word of caution if you’ve never been introduced to the Group Policy Editor before: don’t. As in, “Don’t mess around with it if you don’t know what it does.” (i.e., fiddling around with the Registry isn’t for the faint of heart). Make this one change, follow the instructions, and get out (grin).

R
www.micklerandassociates.com

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.