I have a system that is running Windows 11. I use it for things that won’t run on other OSes or things that are a pain on other OSes, as well as testing things in a Windows environment.
Because I don’t touch this device much, it is mainly accessed through remote desktop.
This device is setup using a local account.
Every once in a while, windows will expire my password and force me to reset it. If I set it to blank, it will just expire it in a few days.
Also, it randomly reboots to I think apply updates.
How do I stop all of this going on WITHOUT switching to another OS or using those tools that heavily modify windows?
Password expiry disable - Open the Local Security Policy Editor (secpol.msc). Open Account Policies > Password Policy, set values as you wish (Maximum password age = 0 will disable password expiry).
Automatic restart disable - Open the Local Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc). Expand Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Legacy Policies. Double click “No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations”. Set to “Enabled”. You may need to adjust some other policy to prevent the device logging out a user from inactivity etc, too, so that the above is respected.
Another options for the restarts is to toggle on “Notify me when a restart is required to finish updating” in Windows Update settings, which it seems will disable automatic restarts in favour of prompting the user:
Needless to say, you should still restart the system in a controlled fashion to apply updates as required.
I’ve still got the dummy reboot folder in the UpdateOrchestrator directory from many moons ago… Windows can’t auto reboot (because it uses task scheduler to do so) if it can’t read this file (because it is now a folder).
