Ever walked away from your computer with your work half completed only to come back and see the message "Windows recently downloaded and installed an important security update to help protect your computer. This update required an automatic restart." Or for that matter while you are working seeing that little pop up window with a countdown that tries to reboot your computer in 10 seconds. People leave their computers on all the time with dozens of windows open and their work half completed. This means that they lose all their work when windows reboots. Sure you can cnfigure Windows to perform a custom manual update, but these updates can still be pushed down on your computer. Most of these updates are in fact critical updates that require a reboot.

To prevent the reboot there is a simple registry fix which will end this annoyance of a rebootand prevent you from losing your work.

As always when you tinker with the registry you must have a curent backup.

Click Start, then Run and tyoe in regedit. Click on File then export. Name the file regback of whatever name you are comfortable with and save it in the My documents Folder and exit.

In case of a mistake, you can always import your registry.

Next click Start again then Run. Then type regedit and press Enter. At the cost of repeating, working with the registry can cause irrepairable harm if not done correcly.In case you are not prficient enough get someone more knowledgeable to help you. With the Registry Editor opened, click and expand KEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies and finally Microsoft\Windows. Right-click on Windows and select New\Key with your left mouse button.Type in the following " WindowsUpdate " and press Enter. A new folder will be created..

Now right-click on that folder and create another new key, this one named AU ( for Automatic Update), and press Enter. In the right-hand pane, where an entry reads (Default); right-click on the white space and select New DWORD Value. Enter the string NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers, and press Enter(Copy and paste it if necessary). Now double-click that entry and change the Value Data to a 1, with the Base button of Hexadecimal selected.

Click on File | Exit, after which the Registry autosaves (just as other applications ought to but don't), and reboot. Once Windows loads this value it should never force a reboot when you are not present.