Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Automatic Updates/Group Policy

Automatic Updates keep turning off no matter what I was doing! Ok, I have finally found what I was looking for. Through many hours of searching google, even a call into Microsoft and still I had no results to show.
I have setup a WSUS in my environment and wanted Automatic updates to be applied once a week at the time I specified. Well, I have came across the answer randomly (I was changing the desktop wallpaper in GPO and came across it).
Go into GPO, highlight the default GPO (or the one applied in your environment) and click edit. Under Computer Configuration-Windows Settings>Security Settings>System Services. Locate and find Automatic updates (pre-08) or Windows Update (08-present) and select automatic. Done!
I cannot believe it was right there, and I have missed it this whole time. I hope this helps someone else in the future!


To add onto this issue, if you turn on automatic updates here, it may not work with some systems. The best way is to leave this option 'not configured' and configure your automatic updates in Computer Configuration>Admin Templates>Windows Components>Windows Update. In here you can specify to turn on automatic updates and point it to a WSUS server.