Don’t you hate it when you install a security patch with Windows Automatic Updates and afterward Windows keeps nagging you to restart? Here’s what the nag dialog box says:
Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?
Your choices are: Restart Now and Restart Later. Unfortunately, by default, “later” means only 10 minutes later, which can be annoying when you’re trying to get some work done, especially since the dialog box steals input focus from whatever window you were working with.
If you run Windows XP Pro, you can use the Group Policy Editor to stop the nagging. If you run Windows 2000, like me, you can do a registry hack to reduce the frequency of the nagging or to stop it altogether. Here are the registry settings:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
“RebootRelaunchTimeout”=dword:0000003c
“RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled”=dword:00000001
RebootRelaunchTimeout is the number of minutes between nags. I entered 3c (hexadecimal), which is 60 minutes (decimal). If you set RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled to 0, can you disable the nags altogether, which I do NOT recommend; eventually (sooner rather than later), you should restart your machine so that the security updates can take effect.
One important point — these registry settings don’t take effect until you either restart your computer or restart the Automatic Update service (Control Panel…Administrative Tools…Services…Automatic Updates — click the service restart button).
For a full explanation of these two registration settings and some related ones, refer to this article.
Awesome! Thanks for that (and for the chuckle from the amusing title). I couldn’t stand this any more today, and searched around for a fix, but the first several pages I found only referred to the XP Pro Group Policy setting. Then I found a couple of pages that gave the registry settings, but no information as to whether they’d work with Win2K (and no info that you’d need to restart the Automatic Updates service for them to take effect). Your page was the first that actually gave the full solution for Win2k users (and a link to the appropriate TechNet article as a bonus) — thanks again.
Good post. Thanks, I’ve shared that with other nagees around the office. Love the title.
Thanks.