One of the oddities of Windows for those used to FreeBSD and Linux is its wild desire to reboot with or without reason. One of the reasons is installing updates - it is rare that after applying updates Windows doesn't ask for a reboot.
And it would be fine if it just mentioned this to the user once and shut up, but no. The message saying you need to reboot will keep popping up regularly (by default, if I'm not mistaken, every 10 minutes). The user can, of course, choose "Remind me in 4 hours" and relax, but Windows itself slyly starts waiting for the moment the user gets distracted.
The point is that if the user shows no activity for 5 minutes from the moment this message appears, the system decides it's safe to reboot. It doesn't care in the slightest whether the user has something open or not, or whether they have unsaved documents or not. It just brazenly closes everything (naturally, without saving anything) and reboots.
Well, let's tell this marvel not to reboot without our knowledge (strange that this isn't the default behavior, since it clearly doesn't know how to behave like Unix).
1) Open gpedit.msc (Start -> Run -> "gpedit.msc")
2) In the Group Policy Editor, go to:
Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Update3) Select the item "Do not automatically reboot with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations".
4) Select "Enabled"
5) Close the Group Policy Editor.
If a domain is present, it is recommended to enable this policy at the domain level, so as not to have to crawl through every computer individually.
The same thing - but via the registry:
1) Open the Registry Editor (Start -> Run -> regedit)
2) Go to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU3) Create a DWORD key (or change the existing one, if present) named "NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers" and set its value to "1"
4) Close the Registry Editor.
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