Automatic Updates is a great feature. Your computer stays protected from threats without worrying about it… but if it’s 3am and I’m trying to play a video game, the last thing I want is for the Automatic Updates to pop up and remind me every 5 minutes that I need to reboot, interrupting my game… Drives me crazy!

Dear Restart Dialog,

I hate you.

If you want to Temporarily Disable this popup message and delay rebooting, you can go about it one of two ways. I’m a command line junkie, so I just type this into a command prompt (make sure you use the quotes)

net stop “automatic updates”

Or you can open Control Panel \ Administrative Tools \ Services and click Stop on automatic updates.

Do not disable the automatic updates service, just stop it. The next time you start up your computer, it will restart.

Note: If you open the Automatic Updates icon in Control Panel, it will automatically restart the service, which will make the dialog start popping up again.