Vista Auto Update options unable to be changed

[bradthegreat]

Okay, so I've been running Vista on my machine since last summer and just recently encountered a very annoying thing. I always just leave my computer on for weeks at a time, so when I wake up and find that it has rebooted, I am very annoyed. I checked the auto update page and it is set to install updates automatically at 3AM without prompting or anything. This causes the machine to download updates while I am asleep, install them and reboot the system, causing me to lose work in programs I have open.

To make matters worse, I can't change any of the options. It says that "Some settings are managed by your system administrator." What does that mean? I am the only user, I have an admin account and have disabled UAC...why can't I change it? This is very annoying as it won't even tell me when it has updates - just reboots!! Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[bradthegreat]

oh, one more thing - I am at a college...I am only plugged in to their network and registered with the system. I am not on the domain or anything, so they can't push policies like that to me, can they?

 

[bradthegreat]

aha! solved my own problem. If anyone runs into this, the solution is in the Group Policy editor. START>RUN?gpedit.msc. Expand Administrative Templates>Windows Components and click on Windows Update. There is a big list of configs that you can do that I had not configured. I don't know why it changed, but I was able to get it working...just FYI for anyone