Solution for blocking Windows Update restarts:

Here you go: https://cresstone.com/apps/shutdownBlocker/

No, this isn’t spam.

If you just need to suppress Windows 10 update auto-restarts, I learned this trick yesterday:

Task Scheduler: Task Scheduler Library -> Microsoft -> Windows -> UpdateOrchestrator -> Reboot <— disable

I use this to block sudden, unexpected reboots caused by game (usually Steam) first-run-once-only routines installing DirectX, .NET frameworks or Visual C++ redistributables but not suppressing the reboot so it’ll suddenly reboot in the middle of installing the game/game redists.

That is amazing thanks!

I’ve never had this happen. Is this a Win10+Steam thing, or do you just have a lot of games? :)

doesn’t have to do with the amount/number of games.

it’s when you deploy an MSI (installshield) installer in a hidden/silent way, it will default to automatically rebooting if necessary where the default (“interactive”) method would give you that prompt that “some files are in use, do you want to reboot now? yes/no” and give you the option of rebooting windows manually so it can change/update those files in the pre-booting process.

happens rarely now compared to winxp/vista/7 but still happens once upon a blue moon. last happened to me with GOG’s installer for wary of the samurai 4 recently.

and uh, i have a ton of games.

Normally when I install something with steam I let it download fully, and before clicking play (when it runs post installation tasks) I tend to browse the folder and check the _REDIST folder, as it usually contains a bunch of useless stuff you’ve installed 500 times already. So I delete those files, click play, and I guess that’s why I’ve never had a steam title reboot on me. (But had many of them crash thanks to Comodo HIPS + Fullscreen)

Shitty installers are a menace. It isn’t as if it is difficult to make a proper MSI, heck, you could probably do them in Orca if you don’t want to spend your download quota on anything bigger. (on the other hand, Installshield is a piece of shit.)

With EA Downloader titles, it seems to run the post-download installer immediately after download, which includes all the DirectX and VC++ redists you would ever want. Since you sometimes have those redists installed already, it will attempt to repair them… and then fail and prevent the launch of the game because it looks for a temporary MSI file referenced to from the ‘repaired’ installation… and that MSI disappeared with the %temp% folder on reboot. (Happened with BF:1 and TF2 most recently).

This doesn’t work, for me at least, on the current fast ring.

If you’re on wifi, you can set your network to “metered” - this causes Windows to wait until you want to actually look for updates.

Darn, that sucks. I knew it was too good to be true. :)

WinAero tweaker will set all that up automatically for you. That actually came from someone on this forum figuring it out the first time, then I submitted it as a tip to ghacks.com, and then Winaero added it to their tweak tool.

http://winaero.com/comment.php?comment.news.1836