Maybe at first you thought "why would you want to turn off auto updates, they keep my computer safe", well while that sounds all well and good (and is good if you're a "home" user) for business users auto update can really suck. Let me explain.

Windows Vista's version of auto update can kill you. Well, not literally but it can cost you a ton of work if you're not careful. See Vista's auto update will force a reboot on you, not asking first (it'll warn you slightly) and just quickly say "fuck you, I'm going to close what you're working on and reboot right now". No last chance to stop it, no big warning that flashes "danger, danger, reboot coming and you can't stop me!". In short it can really suck and cost you tons of time in lost data. I can't count the number of times I've come back to a Vista box that rebooted itself closing and not saving lots of work that I had open. Sure I should be better about saving my stuff as I go (and I am) but mostly it's just a pain in the ass. This gets much much worse when the patches fail. Recently there was an update that failed on all our Vista boxes (not sure why just yet) causing them to reboot over and over trying to install the patch. Install, reboot, fail, reboot, wait, try again, reboot, fail, reboot - on and on. And as slow as Vista reboots this costs lots of lost productivity (and can be extremely frustrating).

So what to do? Well the simplest thing is to turn this crap off all together, but you'll also want to purge any updates that are waiting in the wings to install themselves. I've written a little script for this, all you need to do is paste this into a command prompt and you'll be all set.

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NET STOP WUAUSERV
del /f /s /q C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution
sc config WUAUSERV start= disabled
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That will stop Windows Update, clear out all pending updates, then set the auto update service to disabled. You don't want to do this on a home machine unless you have to, you really do want to be getting those updates to be sure your safe. But on a business machine where stability comes first I think this is an important change to make. Just be sure if you do turn off the auto updates that you're (or someone is) checking regularly to be sure you're as up to date as possible.