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I realize this is more appropriate for our company's admin group to field. However, pretend they are unresponsive just for the sake of discussion =)
If my system is prompting me to reboot now or in a set time (say in 15 mins) is there a way to delay that even further? It is usually just an inconvenient time and I would like to delay beyond the stated time.

(ex) System Restart Required: A newly installed program requires this computer to be restarted. Please save your work and restart your computer. Your computer will automatically be restarted in: xxmins...

Thanks for any responses in advance!

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  • 2
    I don't agree with closing this one at the moment. It may be an end-user question, but - if I'm right in my guess as to the cause of it - it touches on a very important point in relation to how we configure things, and the impact of same on the people who are the ultimate reason why we have the jobs we do. Nov 19, 2009 at 23:14
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    As an aside, poor form on the admins part for requiring restarts in the middle of a work day as common practice. Sep 24, 2012 at 17:05
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    It's better to require the computers be turned off at end of work day and have the updates install on shutdown. Having this dumb policy of rebooting in the middle of work cost our art department 2 1/2 days of recovery. There are some people in the company that actually use the workstation to do irrecoverable work, not just use it as a smart/dumb terminal for ERP/CRM or web browsing. Jan 29, 2013 at 21:36

9 Answers 9

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I have a suggestion that worked for me. Use Process Explorer's tool to find which process displays this window: it was "wuactl*" for me. Right-click on it and use "suspend" tool: this's mainly for debugging, but I liked the way it kills nag screens ;))

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Anonymous has the right answer. The exact process name is SMSCliUI(.exe). Using shutdown /a will only abort a timed shutdown/restart started by the actual shutdown command. SCCM doesn't use that (for instance, shutdown -r -t 120) until the timer ends, at which point the shutdown is already executed and can't be aborted.

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How about shutdown -a ?

Unless you've done something silly like kill lsass.exe, that should work.

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  • Isn't it "Shutdown /a" ?
    – DanBig
    Nov 19, 2009 at 19:10
  • shutdown -i GUI
    – TiFFolk
    Nov 19, 2009 at 19:43
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    shutdown uses dashes for options, just like every other windows command, except the ones that use slashes :).
    – Seth
    Nov 19, 2009 at 21:14
  • In fact there are several versions of shutdown.exe, some of which require "/" and others require "-". If in doubt, ask it with /?. Dec 22, 2009 at 10:18
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It sounds like your admins are in control, to put it simply. Thus the short answer is no. If you ask IT to change it for you, you will find them less than helpful.... not because they're a grouchy bunch, but because it's difficult to maintain policies for individual user preferences. Don't ask them to change your screensaver timeout either, they hate that sort of thing :)

Your best course of action is to reboot the computer. After all, these updates are being forced on you for various reasons, most often security.

Your second best course of action is to talk to IT about the update schedule. They might be willing to modify the general policy to do away with the forced shutdown, or modify the update schedule.

The worst thing you can do, as a user, is to find clever ways to get around this problem. Everyone is happier when users and admins work together to keep things running properly.

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If it's SCCM related, a restart of the SMS Agent Host service will reset the timer.

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If you are being forced to reboot by automatic updates and if you are administrator on the box you can stop the "Windows Update" service and it will kill the countdown.

You can set a group policy to prevent automatic reboots if there is someone currently logged into the machine but you'd probably need your admin department to set that.

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It sounds like this is coming from an Automatic Updates policy (could you confirm, please?), so if you have local Admin on your machine you could stop the Automatic Updates service, but you'll need to be aware that if your admins have a policy set for making this service start automatically, then Group Policy refresh will just start it again at some point.

I really recommend talking to your admins, explaining to them that you know and appreciate what they're doing and why they're doing it, but that it's causing hassle. This, by way of disclaimer, is no guarantee that it would give you the result you want, but if they are anyway good they will be happy to accept some end-user feedback.

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I have found a process called "TsProgressUI.exe" and killed that . When I killed it, it restarted the timer and allowed for more time. But i have also have had this expedite the restart process too, so if you feel like trying this be sure to save everything first just in case. Also you will have to have admin rights to do this i believe

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Some RMM software does this. At my company, we will reboot the machine automatically if the user logged out at night. If they locked it, we'll nag them until they reboot and remind them that it wouldn't come up if they had logged out.

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  • Really, you answered a 3 year old question with that? Whatever for? Sep 24, 2012 at 20:06

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