Question Windows seems to partially reboot?

[RickVS]

About 2x per week I'll come back to my Windows 10 PC and all of my non-MSFT applications will have closed on their own. Edge and Office apps will be open, but everything else has been closed. I thought that Windows was auto rebooting due to updates, but I changed the configuration to stop that. And Windows doesn't apply updates that often. Also, open Excel and Word docs are no longer maximized and it seems that sometimes 'saved' versions of the docs are open, like what you would get if you forced them to close without saving the docs. Any thoughts on what the deal might be? The PC stays on 24/7. Thanks.

 

[rgd1101]

check event log?

 

[RickVS]

Yeah, Windows was installing a security update. I had googled stopping Windows from auto updating but I guess whatever I did didn't work. Is there another way to have Windows accumulate its updates and ask for my permission to reboot and apply the updates?

 

[Bob.B]

Yeah, Windows was installing a security update. I had googled stopping Windows from auto updating but I guess whatever I did didn't work. Is there another way to have Windows accumulate its updates and ask for my permission to reboot and apply the updates?

If you expand that security update you might find it's an update for win def.

I have never seen those shutdown anything.

 

[JayGau]

Windows does security updates very often and rarely reboots for those. Mine asks me about twice a month to reboot, certainly not twice a week. Something else is going on.

A strange behavior like this could be caused by a malware. If you don't have Malwarebytes installed already, install it and run a full scan.

And how much RAM do you have? When an OS runs out of RAM, it will start closing apps and stopping services that are not necessary to prevent a crash. You should monitor that especially if you don't have much memory.

Also, it's very bad practice to never reboot a PC. If the computer stays on 24/7, you should do a reboot at least once a week (a real restart, not a shutdown and power on).

 

[RickVS]

Malwarebytes came back clean. The rig has 32 Gb of RAM. Although I never restart it, the system does hang like once a week requiring a 'power button shutdown'. So by default it does get rebooted weekly. At some point I will reinstall the OS but I've been putting it off.

 

[JayGau]

Malwarebytes came back clean. The rig has 32 Gb of RAM. Although I never restart it, the system does hang like once a week requiring a 'power button shutdown'. So by default it does get rebooted weekly. At some point I will reinstall the OS but I've been putting it off.

No, a power button shutdown is not a proper reboot. As I said, it needs to be a real restart, from the Windows start menu. Shutdown and power on is not good, especially if it's a hard shutdown with the power button after a computer malfunction.

At work, our Windows computers are now set to display annoying messages when people haven't restarted their computer for a while. The messages get more and more insistant if the user doesn't do it, and if they still refuse to reboot after a couple of weeks, the computer does it automatically.

It's just good practice and you will surely notice significant improvement if you take the habit of doing it regularly.