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I wish to somehow disable automatic reboots of Windows 10, as this disrupts long-running commands and I wish to do this 'programatically'; e.g. via a script. For me, it will be too cumbersome to set this option via the UI (many machines and frequent re-installations of Windows).

I do not necessarily wish to disable Windows Update or automatic downloads of updates. I just don't want the machine to reboot without my approval.

How can this be done?

AUOptions regedit key is not the answer

Most Google search results seems to indicate that setting the regedit key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU\AUOptions to 3, followed by a reboot, would make Windows Update set its dropdown menu option to "Notify to schedule restart" instead of the default "Automatic (recommended)", and that this would stop Windows from rebooting automatically.

However, neither of the following commands (+ reboot) will yield that result on my copy of Windows 10 Pro (64-bit), Version 1511 OS Build 10586.218:

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU" /f /v "AUOptions" /t REG_SZ /d "00000003"

reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU" /f /v "AUOptions" /t REG_DWORD /d "3"

Instead, both of these commands will leave the setting at "Automatic (recommended)" which will cause Windows to keep download updates automatically, install them and reboot if necessary.

You can also change this dropdown manually, reboot and check regedit and you'll see that the AUOptions key hasn't changed, indicating that this is not the way to set this option on Windows 10 Pro.

This is not a duplicate of "How to disable automatic reboots in Windows 10?"

Please note, this is not a duplicate of How to disable automatic reboots in Windows 10? as the solution posted in the accepted answer does not work in Windows 10 Professional:

  1. Press Win + R and type regedit then hit Enter
  2. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU (you may need to create the later Keys manually)
  3. Create a new DWORD value called AUOptions and enter a value of either 2 or 3.

2 = Notify before download
3 = Automatically download and notify of installation

  1. Restart PC
  2. Check for updates
  3. Inspect Advanced Settings
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