Change Active Hours for Windows Update in Windows 10

Night Hawk · 09 Oct 2016

It would certainly be nice to have it extended to the 18hr. time frame while the problem seen during the Active hours turned out to be some one or more updates that failed to go on and 10 then decided to undo any changes take a few restarts following a second this time Steam title in contrast to the first being a non Steam and old pc title game. I suspect that may have been the same cumulative that others were having problems with as far as stalling the works on their machines while this simply became a separate unexpected annoyance that resolved itself it would seem.

The longer active hours however will be a chief ingredient here since I may get on and off the desktop a number of times with short breaks but total of 16hrs. or more on occasion.

winuser2016 · 12 May 2017

There is a serious oversight with the implementation of Active Hours in Windows 10 that could potentially lead to corruption of system files.

This happened last night. I had scheduled Active Hours so that updates could occur after 12am. I plugged my computer in to charge but left it in high performance mode with no sleep on inactivity. The battery was already pretty low. Then I shut out the lights and went to sleep. What I overlooked is that I had my charger plugged in to an outlet that it shared with a lamp, and I turned the entire outlet off with a wall switch to shut off the lights.

When I awoke in the morning, my computer was completely out of batteries. When I powered it back up, it resumed in the middle of installing an update. Fortunately, it went successfully, but losing power during an update can easily corrupt system files and make the OS unable to boot.

This is the biggest problem with Active Hours. It forces updates to be installed, even if the system is running on battery power and the batteries are very low. This risk seem to me to cancel out any potential benefit from pushing updates immediately to users.

Night Hawk · 12 May 2017

With a look at the Updates setting for the latest 15063.250 build which came as a periodic update the Active Hours item is no longer found. Instead you see the other two Advanced options and Restart options which is now above the Advanced while previously that had been underneath the Active Hours which was under the Advanced in the original layout. I do one other thing which could explain this to note here. Right under the Windows Update title the following is seen in yellow lettering.
"*Some settings are hidden or managed by your organization" which suggests that may have been from trying to disable the WU during a stretch when a persistent but troublesome AMD Language Feature update will stall at 100% and then revert taking any regular MS updates along with it! With a manual check several brand new updates seem to be going right on without hassle.

Brink · 15 Jun 2018

This tutorial has been updated to add Option Three and Option Four to set Active Hours via group policy.