Windows Update Enable or Disable Auto-restart Notifications for Windows Update in Windows 11

I'm not clear what those settings do. All I need is for it to inform me when an update is ready, but hold off restarting indefinitely until I say go.

Hmmm...... Rather disappointing that there has been no response to Lamberto's question. I don't see how I get it to act like this:

Download any updates as soon as they are detected but DO NOT INSTALL THEM. Just notify me.

When I'm ready, I will push the buttons to do the install.

If a reboot is necessary to complete the update, DO NOT SCHEDULE A REBOOT AUTOMATICALLY. I will decide when a reboot is convenient for me. Don't put a timer on me. I have not yet seen the prompt that allows me to pick a time. But I don't want to pick a time. Just leave me alone until I'm ready.

Does suppressing the notification actually prevent it from beginning a timer that will cause an abrupt reboot when I might be in the middle of something I don't want to interrupt? Like listening to or watching a livestream of some kind, for example. I hate this assumption that Microsoft knows what's best for me. Let me do these things on my schedule.

Sorry @Lamberto Vitali and @WildWilly ,

This tutorial is only to enable or disable seeing the auto-restart notification. It doesn't prevent the auto-restart.

There's really nothing that will 100% prevent an eventual restart from an update. The best you can do is to delay it long enough to restart when you're ready withing a grace period so it doesn't just restart while you're in the middle of something.

You can take a look at the Specify deadlines for automatic updates and restarts group policy used in the tutorial below to specify an auto-restart grace period with Don't auto-restart until end of grace period.

I wanted to add this comment to this one of your tutorials:


But it's on tenforums. I don't feel like signing up for an ID over there as well. I mean geez, I've already got an ID not only here but on 7forums as well. So I'm going to post this here because I think this is the answer to our problem.

The Local Group Policy Editor does NOT look exactly like what you've shown in your tutorial on tf. This is what I am getting right now on my W11 which I've just gotten running in the past couple of days:



Look at the the item I've highlighted in the right pane. And read that description in the middle (whose size I can't adjust because there isn't a draggable thing there). It's exactly what we want. At least it looks like it. Double clicking that legacy policy gives this:



I'm enabling this & I'm going to see if this solves the issue. As you can read there, there is another policy that also needs to be enabled. I'm going to do that one as well.

At this point, I say the jury is still out. I'll see what happens next time I get an update. I just did a pile of them as part of my initial connection to the Internet while configuring the system for the first time. I imagine it will be at least a few days if not a week or two before I get another update. So we just have to be patient.

Also, I don't like that this is classified as a "Legacy" policy. To my way of thinking, that means it's on the chopping block. It's deprecated & could be deimplemented with no notice at any time. I wish there were a way to vote for promoting this back up to the status of a current policy & not a legacy one. There are so many things that Microsoft has done without regard to what real people really want. This seems to do what we want. At least part of it. I still wish it would download the updates & then wait for me to actually install them. But if they get automatically installed & I can indefinitely postpone any required reboots, that's close enough. The installing bit is just that I like to monitor these things to see what they're doing. But if the reboot is completely suppressed, I suppose I can look in the update history to see what happened before I reboot.

Anyway, this greatly improves my mood.

I may have hit the jackpot.





Pay particular attention to option 3 in that second image. I got a momentary chuckle out of seeing that it was the default.

So. Time will tell if this nails it.

By the way, I know these images are ridiculously tiny. Just click on them, & in the resulting image window, magnify them as necessary. I didn't realize until after I posted that that they include my second monitor. In future, I'll trim that. But this should be fine for today.

I'm now using this which works the same in Windows 11: How to Disable Windows 10 Update via Registry or Other Tools

I get a notification something is ready, then when I want, I click it to install and restart if necessary. Although lately I'm seeing updates not requiring a restart, have MS finally got this sorted? I'm old enough to remember Macs needing a restart for a printer driver!

I have stuck with just doing the setup in the Local Group Policy Editor that I described upthread. I imagine the registry tweak you did instead is 100% equivalent. After a couple of days experience it looks like it's working. I'm not getting any notifications of updates pending even though they are. But they are not even getting downloaded. They just appear on the Windows Update tab of Settings. That's OK. So I need to incorporate in my daily routine looking at the Windows Update tab of Settings. That's not too onerous. My Internet connection is not the painfully slow one I used to have. It doesn't save much time to have to launch the download manually myself vs having the download already done in background while I wasn't watching. But the updates are not just installing by magic without my attention, which was part of my goal.

As for delayed or not even scheduled reboots, I haven't hit any of those. What I get, sometimes multiple times a day, are Security Intelligence Updates for Microsoft Defender Antivirus. That sounds like virus signature updates for the antivirus. Those wouldn't necessitate a reboot. I'd be shocked if something so trivial required a reboot. So I'm still waiting for a meatier update before I pronounce total success here. But so far, it's acting like I want.

Speaking of antivirus, I have been holding off installing the one I used to use on W7. Is there a consensus on the W11 built-in antivirus? Does it seem to be good enough? Can I permanently ditch my old antivirus?

Using the registry settings I linked to, I've managed to make it tell me with an icon in the system tray. I think it predownloads then doesn't install or reboot until I say so.

I'm using the built in Win11 AV on some of my machines. Occasionally it annoys me, being very difficult to allow wanted false positives through. On those machines I put AVG on instead.

I have now had the built-in antivirus complain about one thing I was trying to execute. It was an easy matter to tell it to run the thing anyway. I haven't had the experience of it blocking anything a second time. The one it complained about was an installer for an application, something I'm not likely to run again.

Back to the primary topic of this discussion. The changes I noted in my images above appear to do exactly what I want. It does not download nor does it install any update automatically. The Windows Update tab of Settings automatically shows pending updates when such are available. I also get a notification in the Notifications thing on the right end of the Task Bar. When something is pending, I just click the Check for updates button. The pending updates download & install while I watch. When they are done, each one says either Complete or Reboot Required. (Not sure about that wording. Maybe it says Restart instead of Reboot. Whatever. The meaning is the same.) The top of the screen says it will automatically reboot in 4 minutes. However, hours later, after no intervening reboot, it still says it will reboot in 4 minutes. This is exactly what I was looking for. The only quirky thing is that if I manually close all windows & reboot, the pending updates remain pending. I have found that I have to reboot by explicitly clicking the reboot button on the Windows Update tab of Settings. Then the pending updates are installed, sometimes with part of the update happening during shutdown & part of it happening during bootup. It seems that not all reboots are equal.

WildWilly said:

I have now had the built-in antivirus complain about one thing I was trying to execute. It was an easy matter to tell it to run the thing anyway. I haven't had the experience of it blocking anything a second time. The one it complained about was an installer for an application, something I'm not likely to run again.

Click to expand...

For some reason, while it usually behaves like you say, I occasionally find it not admitting to blocking anything. Nothing in the list of things to allow in the future. And unlike AVG, it doeesn't tell you when it's blocking anything, it just silently does it and you wonder why the file won't run, or even worse, disappears. Things get even more complicated with computers on a network where one deletes a file from another.

Thank you for the warning. I will have to remember what you say in case I ever get anything that acts like you describe. So far, I guess I've been lucky. But then, I've had W11 up & running for not even a week so it's still early morning for me.

Depends what sort of programs you run