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Strange things happen. So is it in this story, in the world of the new Windows 7 (which is quite an improvement after Vista but we all know that).

So on a nice shiny day, a nice update comes in and the part that bothers me the most is when it does automatically installing without my approval. Then just change the settings, I thought. But you might be as suprised as I was when I saw that this option was simply greyed out, which was of course even more bothering.

Windows 7 Update Settings

Anyway, the solution is quite simple as was in one of my previous posts with getting rid of that Officepluginres error message. You just fire up your registry editor and go to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU

Then you’ll find a key named AUOptions. You can change these values to 1..5 which represent the following options (the first four do grey out the option box in my case):

1: Download updates but let me choose wether to install them
2: Check for updates but let me choose wether to download and install them
3: Download updates but let me choose wether to install them
4: Install updates automatically
5: Enable the option box to choose manually

When you change it to 5, it will enable the option box and let you choose manually. There might be some other tweaks on this by changing the Group Policy, but this quick fix should also do the work.

AUOptions setting in Registry Editor

Related posts:

1. Printing to Adobe PDF problem – “Invalid Adobe PDF printer properties: Do not change spooler settings”
2. Restore Outlook Account Settings From Second Drive
3. Realtek High Definition Audio not recognized on Windows 7