Windows Updates for UNCW-Owned Computers

Your computer needs to be on at night to receive Windows updates. If a computer does not receive updates for two months in a row, updates will be required during business hours. You will receive a four-hour countdown notification ahead of time, but this update could cause an interruption in work. To prevent this from happening, please be sure to leave your computer on at night with your work saved so you can receive the updates.

In a nutshell: Please leave your UNCW-owned computer on each evening and save your work. If you do this, you will receive the mandatory updates.

• If updates are not installed manually by you (see *Manual Updates below), they will be installed automatically on the last Thursday of the month, after 10 p.m. and before 5 a.m. This could require your computer to reboot, so it’s important you save all your work and close all documents before leaving for the evening.
• Updates to lab computers are installed the third Saturday of the month.
• Important: ITS does all we can to avoid interrupting work which is why these updates are installed after 10 p.m. and before 5 a.m. It is very important that you leave your computer on (but lock the screen using Ctrl + Alt + Del) when you leave for the evening.

Updates are made available to campus machines on the third week of each month. This gives you time to install update(s) on your own before you are required to do so. To manually install updates, go to the Start button on your computer and search for Software Center and look at Updates. If you have updates available, you can install them. If you do nothing, they will become mandatory and will be pushed out to your machine on the last Thursday of each month.