Get Rid of Windows Restart

Everyone on a Windows machine knows how annoying it is that after a Windows update, the little dialog box repeatedly pops up asking you whether you want to Restart Now or Later. Well, I very rarely want to restart “now” after an M$ update and have to keep clicking that darned box again and again.

Well, according to my good friend Amit Agarwal over on Digital Inspiration, there are two ways to get rid of this Windows Annoyance, depending on which version of XP you’re using (you’re not on Vista already are you?).

The key is to kill the “wuauclt.exe” process that runs once the updates are done and Windows is getting desperate to reboot you. The easiest way to do this is to click Start, choose Run, type cmd to get to the Windows command prompt (what used to be called a DOS box) and type the following: sc stop wuauserv

This, explains Agarwal, switches off the update prompt and gets rid of the icon from your system tray, so you can carry on working without having to do a reboot, which these days takes at least 3 minutes on my XP SP2 laptop (anyone got any good ideas on how to speed up a reboot?).

Of course, one thing that Agarwal doesn’t mention is that, usually those updates are important, they’re often a response to some critical security issue that has arisen, so it’s best not to defer the boot for too long. Usually, I’ll opt to restart “later” until just before lunch and then give it the go ahead, that way, when I come back my machine is (usually) fully updated and rebooted and ready to go.