Can I stop my computer from re-booting in 5 mins

Question

I'm on a work computer and it's a big organization and occasionally I get this message that basically says I have 5 minutes to re-boot my computer before it re-boots itself.

No button to cancel, no button to extend the time.

I know that in a large organization, keeping computers up to date is vital for security - what i don't understand is why they insist that it has to be done in the next five minutes. They can't give you like an hour's notice instead? Or maybe do this overnight?

This has happened to me during presentations and we all had to wait for the computer to re-boot. In fact, one time it happened, they bought down their own network because everyone re-booted and logged in at the same time.

Anyway, right now I'm pretty annoyed because I've just lost a ton of work because it re-booted on me whilst I went to lunch. I know, I should have saved my work, but I'm testing multiple systems with multiple databases and sometimes it's not always easy to save my work during the testing.

Is there any way I can bypass this re-boot? The command is coming from the network itself - I just want to bypass it so that if I have something important to do, I want to make sure I do it before I reboot it.

Answer 1

Depending on the kind of restart, you may be able to avoid it by opening a command prompt — you may need elevation — and entering shutdown /a.

This will only work if you have administrator rights for the machine and if it's a system shutdown. If they use third party software to deploy the patches (and many places do), the warning and shutdown might be issued as separate commands by the management software, with no chance to abort when the shutdown command comes.

Answer 2

There's always:

Shutdown -A

to abort a shutdown, but you may not have the privileges needed, and it depends on the situation whether you can actually use it or not.