My goal is to hide or otherwise suppress all Windows Update system tray icons, notifications & popups. Specifically the 'restart your computer to finish installing important updates' pop-up prompt and icon in the system tray in addition to the
pop-up?
I'm trying to configure the GPO's (and clients) in such a way that
- will not display an icon in the system tray and/or bubble notification that new updates are available. Why? The moment the client agent 'see's' that updates have been approved, the system places the icon in the system tray and displays the bubble notification. The user will see the icon & bubble notification and will likely to click it. It will take them to the Windows Update applet but if they try to check for updates they'll get a prompt stating: 'Windows Update cannot currently check for updates, because updates on this computer are controlled by your system administrator.' Well "What's the point of 'notifying' them if they can't do anything?" is the question that will need satisfying. We'd like to avoid drawing attention to something that won't work for the users.
- will not display an icon in the system tray and/or popup stating 'restart your computer to finish installing important updates' immediately after installing updates. Why? Its been our experience that when that window pops up it steals focus from whatever application the user is in. If the user is in the midst of typing (a document, email etc) and they press the 'n' key, that conveniently happens to be the 'hot key' for the "Restartnow" button and their system immediately reboots. A handful of our test users experienced this.
For item number 2 above, I've been successful in pseudo-suppressing the periodic pop-up by setting 'Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations' to a high number, like 159. But we'd like to eliminate the prompt as well as the icon in
the system tray altogether.
All of our clients are Windows 7 Enterprise 32-bit.
WSUS Server is 2003 version 3.2.7600.226