11mo ago

Can automatic rebooting be disabled on Windows 11 Home?

There appears to be no straightforward way to permanently stop Windows 11 Home from rebooting on its own after installing updates. I looked for workarounds but so far I have only found a script that has to run on a schedule to block the reboot by changing "working hours". (Link.)

Is that really the best that is possible?

13 comments

This works for windows servers and it's fucking stupid
Open notepad. Make a change in the notepad window and don't save the change.
For some dumbass reason, likely burried deep on legacy code, the notepad save prompt halts the shutdown process.
- Does this prevent other running programs from getting the WM_CLOSE signal (or whatever the signal sent when the computer tries to shut down is)?
  Also, Windows 11 Notepad seems to have no problem closing with unsaved text. I think it saves it to a temporary location. Do I have to get legacy Notepad back? (I've found instructions for doing that.)
- It doesn't work anymore (at least on win 10) as there was a new notepad released that keeps unsaved content just like notepad++ does
  I know for sure as I had notepad opened unsaved the other night and woke up to a rebooted computer with notepad opened and the content restored when I logged in
  
  Damn.
- I love this. Amazing. Imagine a mission critical server with an edited txt file just saying "DO NOT SAVE AND/OR EXIT!"
  
  Or a proper gpo/registry modification as detailed: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/waas-restart 🤷‍♂️
• Run regedit to open Registry Editor. • Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU. • If the keys don’t exist, create them. • Create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value named NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers and set its value to 1.
(https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/waas-restart)
A batch file with "shutdown /a" or is it "shutdown -a" running every 1 minutes....
It's worth mentioning that you probably can't stop the reboot after the update. You're better off searching how to stop the updates or stop rebooting all together (like the trick mentioned about editing a notepad file).

13 comments