I want to turn off the automatic restart for Windows Update on Windows 7 Home Premium. How do I do this?

thank you abberance this came in handy while scanning a customers hard drive for deleted files. I would have had to start over again and potentially corrupt the disk more.

PABear - The bove is a side job, On my REAL work computer - If the computer restarts at the wrong time i could very possibly loose thousands in an instant  if not millions a year while entering information because my business software cannot auto-recover.

 I will be altering this tomorrow on all our terminals. WeI use an inventory/accounting system plus administrate a webstore, If I loose data many people get screwed. When our computers 'crash' or get turned off unexpectedly ghosts and gremlins appear in the database which are a pain to rectify. If orders get lost we loose face and confidence from our customers.

Jamysee is right If I chose to control when to update then the time spent waiting is still vunerable. I worked on someones old XP machine the other day who has not yet installed SP3. The deal with that is the USER choose not to, Not Microsoft.

My computer can wait until 5pm to shut down. Microsoft should have an easy to find option to shut auto restart off or choose an actual time beyonod the 10 min, 20 min, 2 hour, 4 hour limits.

Lazy.

Period.

Of course you're vulnerable until you have fully installed a patch.  Of course, that means you should just leave your computer switched off all the time, because it will never be fully patched.

If my computer is not fully patched, what is the risk?  I will lose time and data if it is compromised.

If my computer reboots when I'm in the middle of doing something, and have unsaved data in an application, what's the risk?  I will lose time and data.

If I'm running Home Premium, how do I mitigate that second risk?  The only way thru the UI is to switch off Windows Update (either partially or fully).

What I find annoying, is when it actually tells me I have an update, and I actually go in and install it before it restarts, 75% of the time it actually installs them without having to restart the computer.  Why it can't do this by default when it doesn't need a reboot is a mystery to me...

Here's an idea Microsoft.

How about one last update that fixes such a ridiculous behavior.  I have changed all the settings as per the responses in this blog, and then after I update manually once, all the settings go back to force restart in the middle of the night.

I wonder how many World Wide FTEs Microsoft has wasted with this stupid idea.  It's got to be in the Billions.

Thank you Aberrance. The long explanation is very clear and detailed. You deserve kudos. Who doesn't instead is Microsoft: This Win7 is a huge flop fiasco disaster whatever you want to call it..

I hibernate my laptop night before with a lot of web pages for my researches open. I switch it on in the morning and just after resuming from hibernation it ... it reboots!!!! Because of MS updates!!!  AAARRRRGGGHHH !!!!

I had to exercise a lot of self control not to "fresbee" the laptop out from the window..

Sorry, but this is really a no-no-no feature....

No, it's not a feature, it's a disease, a worm/malware evil thing who needs to be eradicated.

Microsoft do a patch to avoid this! Ask your users if  it's ok to reboot !!

By side this Win7 really unblows (contrary of blows?).

Just to say: the CTRL+ALT+DEL takes ages to take control (is real ring zero ?), why ? In the old times it was lightning fast..

If this new Win8 is going to smell like this Win7, I guess then it's really time to move somewhere else for next desktop OS.

First thing I will try is the CTRL+ALT+DEL responsiveness.

Second if it will reboot without my express consent (I deserve at least 2 clicks to confirm reboot!)

Thanks.