IT-departments may require you to restart your computer to complete updates they have pushed out. This is at best annoying, at worst it can ruin your work if you for example have a long running process in progress. (My personal favorite is when I was forced to restart my computer in the middle of a service window upgrading a company system…)
If your company uses System Center you may recognize the following dialog informing you that Your Computer is About to Restart:
You can’t close this window or ask it to stop the shut down. So what can you do? I’ve seen others talk about shutting down Windows Services. That never worked for me, but I discovered that there was an easy way to stop the process. Simply open a command prompt and type
shutdown /a
This will abort the shutdown:
The countdown window will still be open, but when reaching zero nothing will happen!
Now you can finish your work at your own pace, before restarting your computer.