How to stop the irritating “Updating your computer is almost complete – Restart Now?” message
Updating your computer is almost complete – Restart Now?
If you’re running Windows XP SP2, you’ve seen this message. That silly, bothersome dialog box that asks”Updating your computer is almost complete. You must restart your computer for the updates to take effect. Do you want to restart your computer now?”
And there are only two options: Restart Now/Restart Later. “Restart Later” means that every ten minutes the box will pop up again, and take focus, to nag you. Like most of us, you’re probably working and don’t want to save everything just for a silly restart. Here’s the way to kill the box.
Now, to get rid of it:
Start / Run / gpedit.msc / Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations you can configure how often it will nag you. The maximum is 1,440 minutes, which is 24 hours, so put that in and you’re on the road to peace. Unfortunately, this setting only takes place on a reboot so you have to go one step further to get it to take immediate effect. Open the command line again and type gpupdate.exe /force and press ENTER.Hooray! Just another work-around to get an operating system to work the way we work.
Thank you so much!
Did the Trick!!
Thank you very much indeed!
Thanks!!!!!
Thank you
Many thanks
Awesome! Excellent tip!
Perfect … but I don’t know why the hell is Microsoft keep doing such irritating?
Nice post, I really appreciate it!
little things that make life easier… how the heck did you find out about this?
Thank.
I changed it to prompt me every 400mins
You helped another!!! Thank you very very much!!
Thank you, I was very close to physical assault.
Or you could just go to Start/Control Panel/Automatic Updates and select “Download updates for me, but let me choose when to install them.”
No, the problem occurs after you have chosen to install an update, but don’t want to restart the computer right away after installing it.
Thank you for the great info. However, I found that using the “gpupdate /force” command in XP failed to kill the popup without reboot.
Al last…Thanks
Rats! This has been disallowed by our IT group. I can’t do this even though I’m an admin on my machine.
That was super cool
Good work! Thanks!!!!!
Thank you so much.
I want to bake you a cake
thank you
Thanks alot !!
That’s been bugging me for so long… thanks a lot.
Marry me!
Thanks A lot
I want to make you VP of Microsoft1, and teach all…
thanks a ton you made my work easy.
NICE !!!!!!!!!!! Thank you
Have you written any operating systems by any chance? I’d like to change to yours.
Thank you so much, on behalf of Windows users/sufferers everywhere.
Thank you so much! I can only take my computer down at night so to get rid of this annoying pop-up is a godsend!
K so i followed this but there was nothing in the windows component folder about windows updates. what do i do?
never mind, i had to go to the user config instead of the computer. thank you tho!
Awesome! Tnx!
Thanks, it’s been bugging me for days, and randomly asking me to restart my pc in the middle of games
Great, thanks for this. However, the computer can’t find gpupdate.exe. No matter, that’s a minor point.
Microsoft need to sack whoever thought this was a good thing to make happen.
Thank you so much for healing my frustration.
This helped me a lot. Thank you for publishing this.
Windows XP Home doesn’t have Group Policy or anything like that, so this tweak won’t work. Also if you DON’T have admin rights on the computer, there’s no way of disabling this with any tweak. Non-admin accounts even have the ‘restart later’ grayed out, so you’re forced to restart now or 5 minutes after it first pops up.