Those of y’all who, like me, run Windows XP Home edition, which has no Group Policy Editor, may be wondering why you’re being left out of the pop-up squashing party. Well, you’re not, but it’s significantly more difficult to find clear instructions as to how to make the change.

Most places I Googled just said, “If you’re running XP home, just change the appropriate Registry key.” Yeah, well, which one is the appropriate Registry key? This isn’t something you just experiment with. Changing the wrong Registry item is a quick, easy, and fun way to totally hose your Windows installation.

Thankfully, the Lifehacker entry that tackled the “Restart Now? Restart Later?” pop-up in XP Pro had just this conversation in its comment thread. Many thanks to “Robin” for these instructions…

1. Run regedit.

2. Navigate to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]

On my laptop, there was no WindowsUpdate key (keys are represented much like folders in Windows Explorer). I just created one inside [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows], and then created an AU key inside that.

3. Create a new DWORD inside AU. Call it
   “RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled” and set its value to “1″.

4. Create another new DWORD inside AU. Call it “RebootRelaunchTimeout” and set its value to however many minutes you want the delay until the next reminder to be. I chose 720, or every 12 hours. 1440 is the maximum.

But make sure you leave “RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled” enabled. If you set its value to “0″, you’ll get pop-ups every 10 minutes.