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This is beyond maddening. I have been using Windows since the early 90s. I've never seen something so horribly designed.

I recently abandoned my beloved Win7, because security. I can mostly live with Win10's shortcomings. Except for this one. Today at 5pm I walked away from my machine for 30 minutes. Come back at 5:30pm to this popup telling me I have 4 minutes to prevent a reboot that I never asked for. And yes, I took this photo with a camera, since the popup commandeered all other input on my machine.

What if I was running a super important task that took 72 hours to complete and it was 99% finished? Is MS really ok with just forcefully rebooting client machines on a moment's notice? This is almost enough to make me stop using Windows entirely (I already have Linux and OSX machines, I only use Windows for gaming mostly).

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The111
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    The duplicate as several solutions that will disable this prompt and give you more control, the answers go into far better details, then the answer you have received – Ramhound Jan 27 '20 at 02:53
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    [Here](https://superuser.com/questions/957267/how-to-disable-automatic-reboots-in-windows-10) is another duplicate with some other possible solutions. – Ramhound Jan 27 '20 at 02:56
  • @Ramhound thanks. I'm trying [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/531xsv/how_do_you_make_your_active_hours_to_be_24_hours/d7psbpi/) for now. Assuming it works I will be content. If it doesn't I'll try some of the suggestions in the thread you linked. – The111 Jan 27 '20 at 07:06

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Go to Windows 10 Settings, Updates and set Hours of Operation to hours that suit you (mine are set from 7:00am to 9:00pm). Windows will restart outside of the regular hours. There is no need to be frustrated because you can manage it. I will normally check towards the end of the hours (9:00pm) and look for updates and restart at my discretion.

My clients computers are left on and restart overnight when I am not there.

Key - Manage your updates. Do not just let them happen.

There is also a Pause Function in Updates that you can use if you are using the computer after regular hours and still need to Pause for an hour or two or to a specific time. I have used this function when waiting for virtual machines to complete updating so I can shut them down before the host system restarts.

John
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  • You might want to add the part about Pause Updates: https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/pause-windows-10-updates – Natsu Kage Jan 27 '20 at 01:41
  • That is a good idea and I have added that in a very complete way. Thanks – John Jan 27 '20 at 01:44
  • Thanks, that helps, but I think there is still plenty to be frustrated about. 18 hours max for "working hours" is a dumb limitation, as is requiring manual request of a 7 day grace period every time you want one. How easy would it be to just grant the max grace period by default (but notify at the beginning of that period)? But I'll stop [yelling at clouds](https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud) for now. Just going to figure out how to programmatically request said grace period, and configure that request to fire off every time I start my machine. – The111 Jan 27 '20 at 02:02
  • If you are always running multi-day jobs, it will be a bit inconvenient. But Patch Tuesday is pretty much just monthly now. Ad Hoc out of band updates are no longer common – John Jan 27 '20 at 02:07
  • Yeah I just realized I can request just over 30 day grace periods. I think I will just do that on the 1st of every month. I rarely in reality don't shut my machine down every night. But it would have been sooo easy for MS to engineer something that takes that into account. I work in a super secure environment on a Linux machine that will be force rebooted for updates **only** if I haven't rebooted in 28 days. I simply reboot every Monday and never have to think about it otherwise. MS could have easily done something like this. – The111 Jan 27 '20 at 02:09
  • Found [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/531xsv/how_do_you_make_your_active_hours_to_be_24_hours/d7psbpi/) too. Not sure if it's true, but willing to try. – The111 Jan 27 '20 at 02:10
  • I have not tried the Task Scheduler approach, but follow it carefully and it should work – John Jan 27 '20 at 03:10