Is there any way to stop Windows Update when you're a member of a Domain?

[Scarpozzi]

SO....I'm an ex-sysadmin that moved to a business-function role in my organization. I'm struggling here because I hate Windows, but most of the stuff I'm working with now requires the Microsoft Office suite, as well as a few web applications that require IE due to coding and security constraints (old software and ActiveX type crap).

Because I no longer have the IT resources I am used to and can't rely on our IT department, I'm running a few CentOS servers in VirtualBox on my workstation for mySQL and some night time processing. My system is plenty fast, but because I've joined the domain, my system also snags the group policy and reboots without any real warning...thanks to Windows Update.

I was out of the office yesterday...now I'm back to square one on a few projects thanks to this crap. It's worse than dealing with constant power outages.

 

[Micrornd]

You might consider WUMT (google it).
It works well for most users.
I think (not sure) it will work for your Domain situation.

 

[quikah]

Not really, you need to work with your IT to come up with a solution, the Domain admin has control of the system.

Do you have access to the Windows Update service? You can stop that, but the domain admin can set policies that restrict your access and could do things to restart it anyway.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Not really, you need to work with your IT to come up with a solution, the Domain admin has control of the system.

Do you have access to the Windows Update service? You can stop that, but the domain admin can set policies that restrict your access and could do things to restart it anyway.

Yeah...I used to be a Domain Admin...those were the days for stuff like this. I could have just moved my computer out of the group policy OU that does all that junk. Of course, when I was doing systems administration, I was running Linux as my primary desktop OS and did all my windows stuff in a VM. The solution may just be to order another computer to run my database stuff on.

 

[Red Squirrel]

My work place likes to force reboots completely randomly, it's super annoying. They don't seem to use WU to do it though, the restart dialog looks different than the normal WU one.

I found out that if I stop and disable the service SMS Agent Host and Windows Update it stops it from happening. It also stops them from trying to delete my Firefox. I say try, because I found a way to stop that, but it still causes it to terminate when they issue the kill script.

Having worked in IT myself I'm not a fan of users circumventing IT, but sometimes you have to when their shenegans is hindering on your productivity. My work place has this IT group in some tower somewhere that randomly came into the picture years back and took over certain aspects of desktop management, and even our real IT has no say in it. One time their forced reboots almost caused me to drop an entire province's telecommunication systems including 911 because I was in the middle of working on radios with a tech on the line. I was able to set my clock back 1 day to buy me some time to at least finish what I was doing.

Oh and lastly, if you go disable stuff and it turns out to work, be sure to re-enable it once in a while to let it do it's thing. You still want to get the updates etc and not cause any red flags in their management system.