One of my family members has a Windows (Vista) machine which is waking itself up from hibernation in an annoying fashion. Some investigation suggests that Windows Update is the guilty party – it doesn't happen every day, but when it does it's always at the time set for Windows Update to install updates at, and the WindowsUpdate.log file says that it's woken the machine in order to install updates.
I suspect I can fix this by changing it to not install updates automatically, but I'd really rather that I didn't have to. I would prefer if there was some option to simply not wake the machine for it, but I can't see such a thing.
Does anyone know how to stop this from happening? There are quite a few mentions of this kind of thing on the internet but I haven't found any real answers yet.
Best Answer
If you can't use the group policy editor, use Registry Editor instead.
Go to
(you may need to create the WindowsUpdate and AU keys) and create a DWORD value named AUPowerManagement. Set this value to 0.
Use of this registry key to configure Automatic Updates is documented although this particular value is not. That's probably just an oversight on Microsoft's part.