Stopping Windows 10 from updating during the night

[James McCormac]

Hi guys,
This is not an ACP issue but I need some advice please. Twice now my Windows 10 control PC has decided to update/reboot in the middle of the night while I the telescope was observing and I was asleep.

Luckily both times the weather was good. If it got bad during the night we could easily get rained on. We have all the systems in place to stop that but they all rely on the the control PC running. Is there a way to completely stop it rebooting in the middle of the night?

I can see the 'active hours' feature, but this only allows 12 hours which is not enough for long winter nights. I've set it from 10pm to 10am now as I'll catch any reboots at the start of the night.

I am so ****ed off with this, we could lose a serious amount of money in hardware because of an update. A perfect compromise would be for them to hold the updates until I reboot the PC that way I have control over when they are applied. Not even Apple just automatically update your device (they constantly annoy you until you do it). Help

Cheers
James

[James McCormac]

Hi again,
After more digging and switch toggling I found a group policy setting that (in theory) should turn off the updates, or at least regulate how they are applied. See the link below for how to edit the policy settings. Fingers crossed this works or I will have to roll back to windows 7...

Cheers
James

http://www.pcworld.com/article/30851...0-updates.html

[Colin Haig]

You can look for Windows Metered Connection settings for WiFi, and turn that on. I can't find it in Anniversary Edition, but it was an advanced wifi setting. You can also adjust the restart time to like noon or something that wont hit you during the observing run.

[Geoff Gamble]

James,

I reset Group Policy and have sucessfully prohibited any Windows 10 updates. I do get occasional reminders that updates are available but those reminders can be dismissed and no updates take place.

Geoff

[Jerry Yesavage]

Watch out. I think the group policy hack was turned off in the Anniversary update.... there are 1000s of people up in arms on this and one of the main reasons I am staying with Windows 7 on my observatory machine. I think it may still work in the Enterprise Edition.

[Bob Denny]

Thanks to all of you for this!!

[Jerry Yesavage]

OK, this differs by W10 Editio/Versionn. I have W10 Pro and have these deferred... I still have W7 on the observatory machine. Those of you with W10 Home may not be so lucky.....

http://www.howtogeek.com/223083/what...ndows-10-mean/

I hate these guys.

[James McCormac]

Hi all,
Thanks for all the replies, it is good to see I am not alone

I am using W10 Education edition (through the university). Hopefully the group policy step will be enough to stop all the issues. I have a few nights ahead with little sleep just to be sure.

Even more annoying (as I mentioned in a different thread), each time W10 updates it nukes the settings on my custom window services. NSSM can see them but they fail to start. I have to remove them using NSSM then reinstall all of them again. I have to spend half an hour after each update getting my daemons in order, which is inconvenient. We live behind 2 firewalls and the old XP machine wasn't updated for years and ran fine until last year.

I'll keep you posted on any further development, thanks again for the advice.

Cheers
James

[Jerry Yesavage]

Yes, watch the settings. After each shot they try to reset the setting to have you share the downloads.... you basically become a bit-torrent node..... saves them band-width.

We also get Windows through the University but I have to use Pro to get Bitlocker... a horrible encryption system. Much worse than what I used to have.

Thus we had to upgrade W7 to W10 in my lab and it has been a nightmare on 15-20 machines. I tried the upgrade in place, though we have a license for W7 Enterprise, you cannot upgrade in place from Pro to Enterprise so you have to reinstall.... Well I wound up doing clean W10 Pro installs when most of the upgrades didn't take... I should have gone to W7 Enterprise in the first place. What a mess. I have a license for W10 for my observatory but I am leaving that alone for a long while.

Ugg, I could go on and on.

[Bob Denny]

I'm moving this to Hardware/Software/Driver Topics Not Directly Related to Our Software and sticking it. This is great info guys!!