Change the nagging Restart Now or Later message

Have you ever been sitting at your PC and Windows XP prompts you with an annoying message indicating you need to reboot in order for an update to work? It asks if you want to restart Restart Now or Restart Later. You say later. It thinks later should be 10 minutes, you were probably thinking more like the next day.

A temporary fix (and stop all other automatic updates) until you reboot is to stop the Automatic Updates service.

A more permanent solution is to tell it to only remind you say once a day. Here is how to do that...

* In the Start Menu go to Run type gpedit.msc and press Enter * Now a Group Policy editor will open. In this window navigate to: Computer Configuration -> Administrative Template -> Windows Components -> Windows Update * Double click on No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations * In the settings window Choose Enabled and click OK * Double click on Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations * In the settings window Choose Enable and enter 1440 (1 day) and click OK * Close Group Policy Editor or if you prefer editing the registry directly...

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU] "RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled"=dword:00000001 "RebootRelaunchTimeout"=dword:00001440

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU] "NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers"=dword:00000001