You may know it: The popup which asks you to restart your PC after an update has been installed. This is usefull of course. But if you do click on “Restart Later”, it will popup in 10 minutes again. And it’s so annoying, it will popup ontop of every other application so it steals focus. So if you are currently working on something (e.g. writing a document), your focus changes and any further written text goes directly to the recyling bin.

Well here is the solution (Works on Windows XP Proffessional):

Open up a command prompt (Start/Run…/cmd) and write

net stop wuauserv

Now, the update service stops (just for this session) and the popup won’t annoy you anymore.

For Vista users: Well here it should work the same way. But you luckily can set the time until vista asks you to restart up to 4 hours. This is sufficient in the most cases so the above tip is pointless on Vista