HA! I thought I was the only one! It’s that nag screen. I believe if it goes ignored one too many times (or in our case we go idle and miss the nag) it reboots your pc. Since I have my auto updates set to run at 3am, this tends to happen on occasion. Sucks! Especially when you have something open like AIM for example to catch any messages. Inconvenience I guess… not the end of the world, but I did want to say that I’ve experienced it more than once.

And yes the nagging little restart now or later dialog box, will automatically restart your machine if you ignore it for long enough. The little progress bar at the bottom tells you how much time is left before it arbitrarily restarts your machine unless you press the restart later button. Then it will patiently wait to pop up the screen again and start the idle timer once more;

Just wanted to add, if you’re like me and this darn thing catches you off guard (meaning, before you had the chance to apply the settings above) you can simply stop the “Automatic Updates” service. It disappears instantly and is gone til you restart on your own.

Maybe this’ll work on Home Edition too but I can’t test it.

I’m assuming we all know where to stop/restart services

Cheers.

Well, i guess it’s time to do a fresh install of winXP !! i leave my comp for weeks, was more than a month once and never restart or go to login screen, etc, just sits there, showing my desktop.

make sure you do a fresh install.

This is true – the damned thing DOES restart the computer in its own will if left idling long enough. I have seen the dialogue box myself, which says “the computer will be restarted in x minutes…” This is very annoying – more so when you have left the computer on to download something overnight, and you wake up the next morning only to find the computer merrily sitting at the login prompt, and the download bar is at zero.

Thanks for this tip!