Ok, so funny update to my post yesterday regarding Windows 10 update notifications. End of the day today and me and a buddy were talking while closing down for the day, and as he’s talking, I see his Windows 10 computer suddenly prompt for updates OUT OF THE BLUE. I think he was taken by surprised when I pushed him aside and rushed over to see if that was really the case,and sure enough, his computer was prompting. Why it waited until 5:15 I’m not sure, but I’m thinking it could be due to the “Active Hours” setting.
UPDATE 3-4-2020: Confirmed, that setting seems to have brought update notifications back to life for the entire organization!
So what changed??
The ONLY thing I did different, was that I noticed that I couldn’t set the setting for “Show a notification when your PC requires a restart to finish updating”. Now, us logical people would read that and assume that notification only applies if an update was started, and needs a reboot. Nowhere does it say or even imply “this turns on update notifications across the board”.
In addition, there are no settings in the Windows Update GPO/Group Policy template (most recent as of 2/27/2020) to control that setting, it’s just not there. So I found this useful post here: https://www.ajtek.ca/wsus/how-to-setup-manage-and-maintain-wsus-part-4-creating-your-gpos-for-an-inheritance-setup/ (and scroll down to “I Want Notifications!!”), that mentions the missing setting, and use to use Group Policy Preferences to push that setting via a registry setting. The registry setting did work and the switch was flipped.
So I guess that setting, thats not controllable via GPO, that has a completely unrelated label on it, seems to enable update notifications. I guess we’ll see tomorrow!
Another side note – it seems that all of Windows Update’s behavior is designed around scheduled tasks (in Task Scheduler), under two areas: UpdateOrchestrator,and Windows Update. In UpdateOrchestrator, the USO_UxBroker task seems to be the notification task, and if you refresh it, it constantly changes it’s next run time. Wierd!!