Microsoft Is Still Forcing Restarts in Windows. Here’s How to Stop It

More than five years after Windows 10 launched, Microsoft has never managed to curtail one of the operating system’s most annoying features: its willingness to restart the computer while work is being done. For all the company’s claims about how it has optimized this process, it pretends not to understand that users generally hate forced reboots.

As Sean Hollister points out for The Verge, he had actually been in the process of writing about Microsoft’s new habit of force-installing links to the Progressive Web Application (PWA) versions of its Office suite. PWAs are applications that are supposed to behave like a native application despite running in a window. Hollister got up to eat dinner, came back to his desk, and found his own machine had forcibly restarted, leaving him with — you guessed it — the same PWA applications.

Microsoft is once again distributing its software like malware. While I am not accusing Microsoft of shipping a trojan, applications that forcibly install themselves without user consent are, in fact, malware. There’s nothing new about the apps themselves; they’re the same version of Office you could previously use online. The difference is, now they’ve stuffed themselves into the Start Menu so Microsoft can advertise its cloud services to you. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, has made Azure a major part of Microsoft’s business going forward, to the point that the company claims Amazon and Facebook are its major gaming competitors rather than Sony and, to a lesser degree, Nintendo. This is, presumably, part of the effort to shove users into new paradigms of usage.

It’s Your Computer, Not Microsoft’s

Hollister acknowledges that putting web links in the Start Menu is a fairly mild annoyance, but writes:

[T]hey’re the latest proof that Microsoft doesn’t respect your ownership of your own PC, the latest example of Microsoft installing anything it likes in a Windows update up to and including bloatware, and the latest example of Microsoft caring more about the bottom line than whether a few people might lose their work when Windows suddenly shuts down their PC. Luckily, I didn’t lose any work today, but a friend of mine recently did:

Given Microsoft’s ongoing and presumably permanent hostility towards user control, I’d like to take a moment to inform readers of a utility called the Windows Update Blocker (WUB). The Windows Update Blocker does exactly what it says on the tin: It prevents Microsoft from ever rebooting your PC to install updates or installing updates without permission.

There are real reasons not to use this utility. If you activate this utility and do not regularly turn it off to allow the machine to receive security updates, you risk being unprotected when new vulnerabilities appear. It’s a bad idea to turn Windows Update off and then forget to update manually, so if you choose to go this route, you may want to set a periodic alert to remind you to update every few weeks or months. It’s possible for a person to actively want to be updated as soon as patches arrive while refusing to allow Microsoft to reboot their system out from under them.

I disable Windows Update on all testbeds after patching them up because I’ve been burned before by having an update arrive 5-10 days after I configured the system. I’ve been in the middle of 6-8 hour benchmark runs (SPEC Workstation takes a while) and had the system rebooted out from under me, forcing a complete restart of the tests from scratch.

It is not sufficient to define “Active Hours.” It is unreasonable to expect people to keep an exact log of what their Active Hours at all times so they can remember to change them while working late. It is, apparently, too much work for Microsoft to program Windows not to reboot a computer outside of Active Hours if the keyboard is in use, or if the CPU and GPU are both loaded. I can understand why this might be so — the company might be afraid of malware deliberately loading the CPU and GPU as a way to keep Windows Update from running.

But if this is true, the correct way to deal with it is to present the user with a periodic message that says “Windows Update has not rebooted to install patches because you appear to be using the computer. Please schedule a time to reboot or press the ‘Delay’ button to see this prompt again in 4 – 24 hours.” The only thing Microsoft needs to do to fix this problem is bring back a feature that used to be a staple of Windows: The ability to delay a reboot. In Windows 7, if the “A restart is required” prompt popped up, and you didn’t answer it, the machine assumed that it should not restart.

I’m not recommending that people install the Windows Update Blocker, because it’s bad policy to recommend people make their computers less secure, as if this carried no potential downsides. But given Microsoft’s behavior and its significant, negative ongoing impact on end-users, it’s time to talk about solutions, even imperfect ones. Windows Update Blocker won’t prevent Microsoft from eventually installing its malware-ish PWAs, but if you delay the installation until you’re ready to deal with it, you’ll at least know what you’re getting into and where the problems are. PWA installations, incidentally, can be removed in the “Add/Remove Programs” section of Settings or Control Panel.

The correct answer to the question “When is it acceptable to reboot the user’s computer without permission?” is “Never.” Microsoft would like to pretend otherwise. Everyone deserves the right to decide if they want to rent a PC that Microsoft retains control over, or if they prefer owning it themselves. The only time it ought to be permissible to reboot or shut down a computer without the consent of the user is if shutting the machine off is the only way to prevent thermal or electrical damage. In those circumstances, the CPU has far faster reflexes than any human could match. In every other situation, consent should be required.

If Windows can reboot at will through a process I have no opportunity to interrupt, I’m not the person in control of the PC. Until and unless Microsoft wants to start paying me to use one, they’ve got no right to interfere in how it operates.

Edit:  there’s a different way to do this as well: Windows 10 Pro users can configure gpedit.msc to block automatic reboots. Windows 10 Home users can choose to modify their registry and install gpedit.msc, though we do not recommend screwing around in the registry unless you are certain you know what you’re about. I do not know for certain if WUB and the gpedit.msc method behave identically in all circumstances, but assuming that they do, it’s important to remember to periodically restart your machine if you use this approach.

By Joel Hrusaka on October 21, 2020 at 3:01 pm