Wednesday, August 15, 2012

How to disable the Windows XP Windows Update restart nag

If you still use Windows XP, you know that after you install updates that require you to restart, you are shown an initial message to restart. But if you choose not to, a alert keeps popping up nagging you to restart. Well if you are busy or playing a game in my case, you don't want window focus to go to that nag alert especially if you are facing enemies.

In short, you want the nagging to stop. Well if you didn't know, this nag alert is actually a service, and a processes. Stopping the service also terminates the process, so I'm going to show you how to terminate the service.


Since the task manager in XP does not show you the services tab, you have to use the command line to perform this task. Well, there are actually two ways you can do this.

Enter the following code below in any of the two methods that are going to be explained below.
sc stop wuauserv
Methods are below:
  1. The first method you can do to enter this command is by clicking Start, then navigating to run. When the run dialog box displays, copy and paste the line above (bolded) into the box and then press enter. Then watch your system tray icon and the box (if was displaying on the screen) disappear.
  2. The second method involves the same instructions, but in the run box type cmd. When the terminal window popup, copy and paste the line above. That way you can actually see the terminal output if you are interested.
Now in case if you were wondering, stopping this service does not disable automatic updates, so this means that the commands stops the service this one time. Windows Updates and Automatic Updates should continue to function normally.

Hope this has helped you all.