How to disable "Windows update needs your help" pop-up in Windows 8/8.1 clients

Hello IT guys

This blog post is about the Windows Update Pop-up on Windows 8 machines. Sometimes it is annoying when we are working on something in our machine there is a pop-up in the screen, which says “Windows Update needs your help”.

   

 

As a normal user, I don’t understand what it is talking about. But for System Administrators it will be challenging and they get help desk tickets for resolving the issue on end users machines.

I was scratching my head to identify what could be the problem. While researching on this issue, I came to know that this is an issue with the Group Policy settings.

The cause for the above is the GPO Setting:

 

Computer configuration>Administrative Templates>Windows Components> Windows update> Configure Automatic updates

 

The above settings that I have enabled in my environment based on the support article which recommends to avoid unexpected reboot on clients when we do patching through ConfigMgr.

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/2476479

 

Due to that policy is disabled, the Automatic Updates Client Agent couldn’t check for updates and this message pops up. But it doesn’t restrict the usage for Windows Update feature on clients.

When I dig through the policy settings I understood that the machines which are being managed by ConfigMgr for Software Updates deployment and the “Configure Automatic Updates” policy is Disabled are not showing the Pop-Up.

Because the Pop-up is meant for the machines which are not able to scan against ConfigMgr WSUS/ Microsoft Update for the last 30 days.

Conclusion:

To work around this Pop-up issue we have to make sure below things.

  • “Configure Automatic Updates” group policy setting should be either Not Configured or Enabled.

  • If we want to disable “Configure Automatic Updates” group policy on clients, we have to make sure we use other methods like ConfigMgr to manage Software Updates on the Clients.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Senthilkumar Pandurangan

Support Escalation Engineer | Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager

 

Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confers no rights