It also gives you the option of re-trying the update "tonight" which takes up WAY too much of my cognitive load. "Tonight" doesn't appear to be configurable, or even well-defined, although an obscure knowledge-base article tells me it's between "2:00 and 5:00 a.m", which is nothing like my expectation of what "tonight" means. Does that run if my laptop is sleeping? What about if it needs to reboot? I really should know the answers to these questions ...

Windows does sometimes wake up a laptop to apply updates and put it back to sleep afterwards.

This can be rather dangerous if your laptop is stuck in a backpack with no airflow on a hot day.

It's not only updates that do that. All the HP laptops I've used wake up from sleep in my bag while I'm moving.

The laptop would be hot enough to toast bread when I pull it out.

Pretty sure that "tonight" just dismisses the prompt until "tonight" at which point you'll see it again, it doesn't irrevocably schedule the update for "tonight."

I think you're probably right which, given that "tonight" means between 02:00 and 05:00, explains why I never get around to applying those updates.

Yeah, the important one it offers is "Not Now". If you tell it "Not Now", it will not install that update, period. Windows 10, by default, will install those updates automatically and pick a random time or immediately reboot.

If I'm out of town for 2 weeks, I cannot have my Windows 10 machine reboot, it runs the software for my security cameras and that can't start until I log back in. Thankfully, I set up Windows Update to not install updates automatically(Win10 Pro) way back when it came out and it has continued to stick. Major updates are a constant worry that they will finally break this forever when it shouldn't even be a concern in the first place.

Windows also tells you it will perform an update on restart. It says "Update and restart" rather than just restart.

But it doesn't have a "restart and defer update" option. If you need to restart for some other reason, you're forced to take the update.

Holding shift while opening the power menu and clicking Restart used to do this, but admittedly, I haven't tried it in a while.

I don't know about Win 10 but I get around that on Win 7 by doing "shutdown /r /t 0" for reboot and "shutdown /s /t 0" for a shutdown.

This is why I like Linux - you don't need to learn the commandline just for basic OS functionality. Windows really needs to get a decent GUI already.

^_^

In cmd or PowerShell:

shutdown /r /t 0

AFAIK, this has always avoided updates.