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I saw that happen once in a big presentation.
There was a team of students presenting their work to ~200 people. Right in the middle, a pop-up says updates are finished and the computer needs to restart. It has a helpful 60-second countdown, but “cancel” is grayed out, so all they can do is watch.
I was only in the audience and I still have nightmares.
shutdown.exe -ashould take care of situations like that. It's not an excuse for taking away your options on the UI though.What about all those update skippers that start complaining to Microsoft when their system breaks because they don't understand that updates are crucial for a good running system?
I get why Microsoft forces it now on the Home editions.
Does that require admin access? It wasn't their machine, it was one the school provided for the auditorium.
By default a normal user can abort the shutdown. They could also configure group policy to prevent shutdown permissions which also prevents aborting a shutdown.
The GPO is
Computer Configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Local Policies > User Rights Assignment > Shut down the system.
Greyed out options like that almost always mean the person has been hitting cancel or delay for several warnings already.
This wasn't their machine, it was one the school provided for the auditorium.
And someone still had to configure that
I don't want to be that guy, because I still hate Windows, but... most people who have these problems just didn't set up updates properly. Well, that, or they never restart their computer.