Those unexpected times

So you need your Windows 10 for something important from maybe a church service, or you have an important meeting on zoom for Tuesday.   You have something important going on and Windows brings up this notification that you should reboot your system for an Windows 10 update.  You can tell it to schedule the update later that day or even during the night with no problems but what if you have to reboot your system?   There’s the problem, you do have the option to restart without updating but most people don’t know that option.   It’s an easy fix.   Go into command Mode by typing Cmd into the search bar.

and then type:

shutdown -s -t 0

Once it shutdowns you just reboot your system and you are back to where you left off.  It however isn’t always that simple with people who seem to forget that little trick from time to time.

Rolling Updates

What if You don’t have time to do this little trick or you forget.  Well you know what happens, you wait for the update to take place.  It can take anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes depending on how big the update is.   I’ve seen it take like 10 mins on some systems. It can take some time to update Windows 10 because you get some massive updates sometimes when it comes to updates.   You get new Revisions and you get new patches every 2nd Tuesday of the month.   What if you need the updates to update on a certain day.     There is a way to do it.  Depending on which day you need to do the updates, you can make Windows 10 pause the updates up to 35 days and that can be a very useful way to prevent unexpected updates when you need Windows 10 to just be working.   You can do this by going into windows update settings

Once you click Windows Update Settings and go to the menu.   You’ll want to hit the advanced options and then look for pause updates.   Then you can select a date up to 35 days.    This is something I tell my clients from time to time to do this because it really does help them from having those unexpected downtimes.

Once you do this, write down the date you selected and put it somewhere next your computer.   I like to use Google Calendar or some calendar app to remind a few days before that date and then I update Windows 10 at my convenience not the other way around.   You find a day that is convenient for you and you update windows before the 35 days or you just let it do it’s thing and you have two updates in one most of the time.   Once you update and restart your system, you go back into Windows update settings and pause the updates for another 35 days or whatever date you want to pause till.   You start the process over again and you have a rolling update schedule.

Change Active Hours

Something else I tell my clients is to change the active hours you work on your system.   Even though Windows 10 does a really good job, it isn’t perfect and thus you might be using the system when the system thinks it should be inactive.   You can also change that on the windows update setting page.   I usually turn off the active hours feature and then change the active hours and put it when I will be using the computer the most of the time.

Schedule the update

You can also schedule when Windows will do the update.   In the early days you could only pause the update for 4 hours before it would restart the system without your knowledge.   Now you can tell Windows when to restart the system and usually it will pick sometime while you are inactive and not doing anything.   So you can select the time that is convenient for you.   You can do this by just going to Windows update Settings page(See above) and hit the Schedule the Restart and then select the time of day you want the system to restart the computer.  This way if you forgot that there is an update and you are busy with work, you can tell it to wait till you aren’t busy with some important work.

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