Was it your personal computer or a company managed computer? Either way, when to automatically start updates is just a setting that’s easily set. As is the “pause updates for X weeks” so that you have more weeks to do an intentional reboot. There might be some major security patches they’ve forced through anyways? But I don’t think I’ve had any windows update issues since like 2017 or 2018.
It was not managed, honestly I should’ve disabled bitlocker, I just never expected it to be a problem.
As to settings for when it installs updates, they didn’t seem to stick or were not always respected in my experience. I spent a bit of effort trying to make sure it wasn’t configured to do that but it would still just go for it anyway if the system ever became idle after midnight or so.
Anyway this story has a happy ending because after that I decided to give daily driving linux another shot, and none of the issues I had experienced previously still exist here.
In fact, incredibly enough I have found on average that the games I play perform better on Linux now than they did on Windows.
And my OS never installs updates without my permission, let alone forcing an unscheduled reboot.
