Disable auto reboot in windows XP and Home editions

Posted on February 17th, 2008 by Jason

Are you annoyed by the restart prompt which appears every time you update windows.

In order to configure no auto reboot settings for windows XP Professional and Home your windows must have service pack2 installed.

But the to remove auto reboot for windows XP home and Professional are different.

For Windows XP Professional

1. Open Start >> Run and type gpedit.msc (group policy editor) and press Enter

2. Navigate to the following path

Local Computer Policy\Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\ Windows Components\Windows Update

3. Double click “No auto-restart for schedule Automatic Updates installations” and select to enable this setting.

4. Restart windows.

For Windows XP Home Edition

Procedure for windows XP Home edition is quite different as it doesn’t have group policy editor.

1. Open Start >>Run and type regedit (registry editor )

2. Navigate to the following path[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows

\WindowsUpdate\AU]

3. Locate the following keys:

“RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled” and “NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers” and set their values as 0 and 1

4. if these registry key doesn’t exist create them with type as dword values in this registry location.

5. Exit registry and restart.

Tip: You can also disable windows update by typing the following command at run prompt.

net stop wuauserv

But before running this command, make sure to stop all the instances of wuauclt.exe from task manager right click end process for all wuauclt.exe.

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Tags: auto reboot, command, Computer, computer policy, configuration, group policy editor, Microsoft, regedit, restart, task manager, Windows, windows update, windows xp, windows xp home edition

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 4:39 pm and is filed under Windows XP. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Disable auto reboot in windows XP and Home editions”

Semi on 17 May 2008 at 5:59 am #

Hi,

I have Windows XP Home edition, but in my registry the location [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows
\WindowsUpdate\AU] does not even exist. It goes up to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows]. It doesn’t allow me to create new folders, only new keys. Where should I create the keys mentioned in the article?

Thank you,
S.