How to Prevent Windows 10 from Auto Restarting after Updates

Windows 10 has been a great feature rich OS. But the only short-coming is the auto-restart after the auto-updates.

I do like the auto update. But I like having the option of restarting my PC manually.

I like to hibernate my PC at night so my work stays safe.

But sometimes if I leave my PC on overnight, I come back to find it has restarted and all my work is lost.

Windows does give us the ability to specify the inactive hours.

And it also gives the ability to postpone the restart for up to a week or to temporarily turn auto-updates off for a week.

But it’s not enough because many of us have a lot of background things running overnight. And inactive hours aren’t always fixed.

I found the hint in Windows own forum:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/disable-windows-10-automatic-restart-after-updates/16f1826d-a796-4de8-ac99-1d625420d265

Steps to prevent auto-restart from happening:

• Go to folder:

%windir%\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator

• Rename the files like so:

“Reboot” to “Reboot.old”

“Reboot_AC” to “Reboot_AC.old”

“Reboot_Battery” to “Reboot_Battery.old”

• Finally create empty directories for:

“Reboot”

Your folder should look like this:

That’s it!

Windows will now perform auto-updates, but won’t be able to auto-reboot after that.

But I will recommend rebooting manually soon enough after an update. So as to not run into any OS problems.

But this does give you more control.

To go back to auto-reboots on, just delete the empty directories. And rename .old back to original names.