We have all been there – you are working on a document or talking with someone on Skype and suddenly Windows shows a popup message that updates are being installed and it is going to reboot. You basically have no choice but to leave everything in the middle and get ready for the “updates are being installed” screen for next few minutes. It appears that Microsoft is going to add a new feature in Windows 10 in the upcoming major update that will allow you to customize when the operating system is going to reboot after installing updates or when the updates are going to be installed. But until the this new update is released, you can still configure Windows 10 and prevent it from rebooting after installing some updates.
This is achieved through the Task Scheduler as follows:
- Press the hotkey Win+R, type taskschd.msc and press Enter.
- This will open the Task Scheduler window. In this window, expand the tree view control on the left side and select Task Scheduler Library → Microsoft → Windows → UpdateOrchestrator.
- In the task details that show in the center of the window, select the Reboot task.
- Now on the right-side of the window, scroll down and click on the Disable button to disable this task.
That’s it. Now Windows will not automatically reboot after installing the updates. However, once Windows has installed any new updates, you will have to manually reboot your PC in order for the update installation to be finalized. This works out great for the home computers that we shutdown and start again multiple times in a day. But this setup not be a good idea for the computers that you have to keep running for multiple days or weeks at a stretch. Another thing to note is that this method works at this moment, but owing to the new rapid updates model adopted by Microsoft, it might not work in the future for Windows 10.