Windows 10 automatic restarts

[Yuriman]

Trying to figure out how to get control of this, so far drawing a blank. Most of the machines I monitor have Win10 Pro, and while I imagine there's probably a way to prevent update restarts with an Enterprise license, that's not feasible in the near-term.

Example: Small nursing home using Win10 at a nurse's station. Nurse goes to look up allergy information on a patient while giving medication, machine reboots mid-lookup.

Windows lets you define active hours, but needs a 6 hour window where it can reboot at any time. However, some of these Windows machines are in areas where they might be used at any point of the day, and an untimely reboot could have serious consequences.

I've read about making a powershell script to have a rolling change to active hours, constantly moving it ahead, but this seems like a really inelegant solution.

Anyone have any thoughts?

 

[deustroop]

"Nurse goes to look up allergy information on a patient while giving medication, machine reboots mid-lookup."

The nurse should know what she's doing before doing it.

"Windows lets you define active hours, but needs a 6 hour window where it can reboot at any time."

Not sure about that. The 6 hr. window may be attenuated by a fixed restart time. See Restart Options, Schedule a Time.

Also, you might have to schedule this activity per station. But you should first determine what MS means by the statement that Windows will not restart without "checking to see that you are not using it." Maybe browsing and reading patient records during break will qualify as usage.

 

[Yuriman]

To my knowledge, the nurses are required by law to look these things up, or at least by company policy (I work at an MSP, and I'm unsure of the details). Imagine a medical emergency, and they need to look up if the patient has any reactions to an otherwise life-saving treatment. At the very least, it's highly annoying for a workstation to restart in the middle of typing a sentence - which they do, outside of active hours.

My experimentation suggests that a fixed time must be selected after updates are pushed, meaning I can't do this in advance, and the way we push updates is generally that we validate them and them make the updates available to be downloaded at next opportunity.

These are multi-user machines. One nurse might take the time to schedule a reboot after her shift, which will hit the next person to use it, and there won't be an opt-out, it'll just shut down in the middle of their work.

 

[DaveSimmons]

I've read about making a powershell script to have a rolling change to active hours, constantly moving it ahead, but this seems like a really inelegant solution.

If that means it never restarts, that could lead to the machine getting infected after a security fix gets postponed indefinitely.

My Windows 10 shows a little (1) in Notification Center with the message telling me a restart is going to happen. If staff could learn to reboot in between patients before the automatic restart is triggered then the problem will go away.

 

[Yuriman]

If that means it never restarts, that could lead to the machine getting infected after a security fix gets postponed indefinitely.

My Windows 10 shows a little (1) in Notification Center with the message telling me a restart is going to happen. If staff could learn to reboot in between patients before the automatic restart is triggered then the problem will go away.

This is a helpful suggestion.

I believe they also have a machine which controls all of the key-locks and surveillance cameras which is rebooting now. For the last decade or so it hasn't been a problem, but we might need to migrate these functions to something that isn't Windows 10 if I can't, for instance, postpone the reboot to happen every week on Sunday at 4AM or something. Unfortunately, you can't set a window of time any less than 6 hours wide for updates to take place, and it's very possible for us to reboot the machine at, say, 10PM, for an update to install at 10:30 and for it to interrupt a nurse at 11, if that's within the forced minimum 6 hour window which Windows is allowed to reboot whenever it likes.