Any way to get a warning before Windows updates and reboots?

Question

Windows seems to obey my active hours set under Settings > Windows Update. But I would like to know ahead of time if my work computer is going to reboot while I'm away. I have tried various times over the years to disable automatic updates and rebooting by Windows Update, and sometimes that worked for a while, but that no longer works. The "Pause updates for X days" feature is better than nothing, but really not ideal.

I understand the reason for updating periodically and I've always done that manually. But it is very disruptive to me when reboots occur without my knowledge. I usually leave my computer on all the time. Often I have important work running overnight, and that can go for multiple days. Depending on what is running, that work/progress could be lost completely if a reboot occurs before it completes. Actually my company has a lot of use cases like that, with processes running for weeks sometimes, and these unexpected reboots are quite costly. Our people have to remember to update in between processes, pause updates when starting something that may run long, and hope that the process finishes before the updates pause is ended. So in reality, this is very hit-and-miss protection against unexpected reboots. They interrupt work frequently and cause delays in work for customers.

On top of that, this is more minor, but I have a bunch of apps open and leave them open. That saves me time when I get to work, and I can remember where I was and pick up where I left off. Some apps remember things the next time they are started after being killed by a reboot, but many don't. Web browsers remember what tabs were open nowadays. But some apps will revert to what was open the last time they were closed normally, and I may not remember what was open. Others don't remember anything when they are killed.

If I knew a reboot was going to occur overnight, I would be able to-

• pause updates if needed for a long-running process
• close apps myself so they would keep my place
• note down anything I should remember for the next morning about what I was working on or what I had open

I have given up trying to limit Windows Update to on-demand updates and reboots. As far as I know there no longer any way to do that. If there is, please let me know.

But apart from that, I would love to have some kind of notification during the day that a reboot will occur overnight!

Any help is appreciated. By the way, this goes for both Windows 10 and 11.