Perhaps you're right and you just have to keep shutting your laptop down and booting up from cold to prevent Windows problems.. sorry, updates from happening at the wrong time.

I watched a three hour stream of a professional chess player and youtuber and at the start he's saying "...oh, and I just updated my Windows laptop a few days ago so hopefully it won't start to slow down or apply an update while I'm playing". Amazing - he's playing bullet chess where you typically make each move in a second or so, and hundreds of games like that in a row so even a hint of lag is going to result in him moving the piece to the wrong place, or timing out and losing the tournament and he has to "hope" that his own computer won't decide it knows when to update and/or reboot.

I have no idea how people put up with this shit. It's like an abusive relationship.

Those really in the know seems to upgrade to a variant that allows them to go into group policy and curb stomp the auto-update.

Others achieve the same via registry modifications...

Or you block the download of updates via setting the wi-fi as a metered connection.

Not sure if that trick works any more in recent updates.

Yeah I think you're sort of missing the point if you think it's acceptable to have to keep up with this season's registry hacks or hex edit a DLL or whatever so you can play a game or do your job.

The thing is, beyond the wi-fi blocking update on my personal PC, I've never had to do anything else and I can't remember a forced reboot in Windows 10.

I don't know, with this trick I haven't downloaded them. (at least since february)

Well, I don't have to put up with it, even if I'm on Windows 10.

If you can get it, LTSB is your friend.

Anecdotal, but I, on the other hand, have had quite a few forced reboot.

I close the lid of my laptop and Windows goes to sleep, but during the night it somehow decides to do its thing and reboots. The thing is, I have BIOS password and a dual boot.

It will then just hangs indefinitely on the BIOS password prompt. Fans spinning, CPU unthrottled for hours. And then lose network drivers inside Windows. Reinstalling drivers in the morning is not fun.

That sounds like it's setting an RTC timer to wake up. You may be able to disable that. It may be called wake on timer or wake on RTC.

I have win10 pro, in theory I have disabled automatic reboots. In theory.

Yeah that might be it, I always hibernate my machines because I like to continue where I have left off.