I HATE when windows restarts in middle of night

Ok I'm getting really really annoyed with windows when it just decides to restart itself in the middle of the night.

I have programs & work that I leave open as I'm working on it - so the last thing I want is this stupid computer restarting itself when it feels like it in the middle of the night.

So how can I turn this off so that it ONLY restarts when it prompts me or I do it myself?

I DO NOT want this automatic restart option any more. STUPID.

JohnnyScience said:

Ok I'm getting really really annoyed with windows when it just decides to restart itself in the middle of the night.

I have programs & work that I leave open as I'm working on it - so the last thing I want is this stupid computer restarting itself when it feels like it in the middle of the night.

So how can I turn this off so that it ONLY restarts when it prompts me or I do it myself?

I DO NOT want this automatic restart option any more. STUPID.

Only certain updates require the automatic reboot. In my experience, it happens very rarely. If your PC is rebooting that often, you probably have a hardware issue.

I've noticed it happening too, when I leave it running because I want to record a TV program late at night it does that - goes to sleep... and the inexpliquably resumes at random on occasions during the early hours.

Suspect it could well be WMC updates causing this to occur

Click on the start button and then type

task scheduler

in the dialog box at the botton (the one that says "search programs and files). Take a look at all the goodies in the active tasks section, paying particular attention to "triggers" and see if you can identify a likely culprit.

Also,

If anything like I have experienced, it is probably a BSOD and you don't have it set to not automatically restart, so when you see it later, the BSOD may not be apparent. Check your Event Viewer and minidump folder to see if you find anything that correlates to when it happened.

Check Diagnostics>Performance log for that time period to see exactly what occurs.

Set Windows Updates to download but not install Updates, which will prompt you later to quickly (and more selectively) do it yourself.

See if that helps.

I've examined my event logs. It does seem in my case it's as I suspected and the cause is Media Centre fetching updates, however what it doesn't tell me is whether there are service updates which aren't part of Windows Updates... or if the updates are purely forthcoming WMC tuner program information...

You could turn off automatic updates on Media Center.