Disable automatic reboots on Windows 10 (maybe)

Look, I get it, updates are important, and so is installing them timely. But after waking up this morning to find yet-another overnight job lost to an automatic reboot, it’s the last straw. To afford nice things (you know, like computers), I need to do my job, and that requires actually using my computer and delivering the results, including the output of long-running jobs.

For Windows 10 Professional/Enterprise/whatchamacallit, this can be done through the group policy editor (gpedit.msc), but this is not available on the Home edition (and workarounds involve sketchy download sites). So, trying this to defeat auto-updates instead (from this thread). Note, these files are protected and you need admin privileges to touch them of course:

• Open %windir%\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator
• Rename ‘Reboot’ to Reboot.old
• Create a dummy folder named Reboot (I assume this prevents the “missing” file being restored or overwritten).

We’ll see if this does anything, or for how long…!