Prevent Windows 10 from Automatically Updating and Restarting Causing You To Lose Your Work

If you're reading this, your probably frustrated because Windows 10 ran an auto-update, restarted, and you lost some valuable work or your computational process was interrupted because of it. It's extremely difficult to find a solution to this, as Microsoft wants the auto-updates to occur, forcing you to update.

This is the best answer I found so far and will repeat the process that I took to solve the automatic update and restart issue.

This is a two-step process to ensure that Windows 10 will not automatically restart and update.

Step 1.

1. Press Windows key + R keyboard shortcut to open the Run command.
2. Type the following path and click "OK":
%windir%\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator
3. Select the "Reboot" (it does not have an extension)
file right-click it and select "Rename".
4. Rename the Reboot file to "Reboot.old".
5. Right-click inside the folder, select "New," and click on "Folder".
6. Name the New Folder "Reboot".
7. Now restart your computer.

Step 2.

1. Click on the “Start” button and type
gpedit.msc
press Enter.
2. In the Local Group Policy Editor, go to
Computer Configuration ->
->Administrative Templates->
-> Windows Components->
-> Windows Update
3. Double-click on “No auto-restart with automatic installations of scheduled updates”.
4. Select "Enabled", and then click "OK".
5. Close the local group policy editor.

Note: Some users say that when they only did Step 2, after enabling "No auto-restart with automatic installations of scheduled updates" they get asked to set active hours. I found that when I did Step 1 followed by Step 2, Windows did not ask me to set active hours.

I hope that these instructions help you resolve your problem of Windows Update restarting your computer when you don't want it to.