Prevent Forced Reboots After Automatic Updates in Windows 10

So you have just finished that report for the next big meeting and it took your entire day, but suddenly Windows also finished installing updates and it forced a system reboot. You did not even have the time to save the report. All the hard work and all the research is now down the drain. This happened because of a setting in Windows 10 that reboots your system after successfully installing automatic updates if your computer is outside the range of the active hours.

Active hours in Windows 10 is a daily time period selected by the user when the user is supposed to be using the PC. Windows avoids rebooting the system after automatic updates during these active hours. For example, if you have set the active hours to be from 9 AM to 5 PM then your system will not force-rebooted during these hours. But the question is what if you work extra hours. If you keep working on your computer for 15 minutes more, Windows 10 will cause forced reboot.

In order to avoid this from happening, you can change the active hours to be automatically adjusted as long as the system is actively being used. This is done in the following manner:

  1. Press Win+I to open Windows settings.
  2. Select Update & Security to open the automatic update related settings.Set Active Hours in Windows 10
  3. Click on the Windows Update in the left side and then on Change active hours.Set Active Hours in Windows 10
  4. Turn on Automatically adjust active hours for this device based on activity.Auto-Adjust Active Hours in Windows 10
  5. Close any windows opened through these steps.

As long as your PC is active (it is noticing user input) Windows will keep changing the active hours temporarily so that the current time is always in the range of the active hours. This prevents the system from ever initiating a forced reboot. This does not change the manually set active hours range from the settings.