One of the most annoying things with any flavor of Windows is those annoying restarts when your computer downloads updates, regardless of the way Automatic Updates have been set up. Fortunately, it is possible to take complete control over the manner in which XP handles Automatic Updates and it is pretty easy to do.

Pretty much everyone knows that to change the Automatic Updates settings, you go to the Security Center in the Control Panel. Here you can make some basic alterations to the settings, but there are times that I have found my computer has updated and restarted despite me having changed the settings to notify me before installing updates. This is not good at all when your computer is running processes that should not be stopped. Fortunately, there is another way to configure your updates, and it doesn’t involve any registry hacks.

1. Click the Start button. Then, click Run or just hit “r”.
2. Type: gpedit.msc and hit Enter. This brings up the Group Policy screen.
3. On the Group Policy screen, there are two menu trees, one for the Local Computer Policy and one for User Policy. It is the Local Computer Policy that needs to be changed.
4. Go to Local Computer Policy and open Computer Configuration. Then open Administrative Templates and look through the list until you find Windows Components, among the components that come up, you will see Windows Update, open it.
5. Among the options here you will see that No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Update installation is not configured. Open it up and change the setting to Enabled and click OK.
6. Restart your system for your changes to take effect. Your computer should not restart from Automatic Updates that you have not requested ever again.

There are a few other settings in there that can be tweaked. The cool thing about the Group Policy editor is that it will display information about the settings as you go. Double click on any component and you will see two tabs. The tab in the background is entitled “Explain” and it gives you a perfect explanation about what each setting will do.

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