C# Programming question: Detect that Windows 10 is about to reboot (restart) without warning

A pending shutdown (as in "for changes to apply, you need to reboot - do it now or do it later?) and a shutdown already in progress (one with a time counter set to x seconds) are two different things. The latter is what the author talks about, i guess. Is that easily detectable?

In this case it is the latter

McKnife:

>>>Windows will not decide to reboot on its own - Agreed.

>>>99,9% of installers will ask before they reboot - Agreed.

>>>[ ... you install windows updates and don't do the reboot ... ] [ ... so it will be enforced after a few days while constantly warning you...]  - Agreed.

>>>[... there is no system wide setting that can be queried "are you about to reboot in x minutes?" ...] - Okay - so what does a "pending reboot" mean.  I've seen this check performed in code snippets.  Is it saying "I know there is a reboot scheduled, but I don't know when?"

David Johnson, CD, MVP - This makes sense to me.  I will try the steps you recommend and report back here.

Tom, I am not familiar with what Shaun brought up, you should see if you can try it. However, I remain pessimistic as to whether this will help in most cases, since some programs will even have their own timer running that runs a shutdown -r command at some point.

An example I can think of if is someone runs something like this against your computer (or the API equivalent)

shutdown \\PC -r -f -t 0

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and OP basically wants this when it happens

shutdown -a

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Shaun Vermaak:

Your information on "Detect reboot" and "Cancel reboot" is intriguing.  I'll play around with this and see what happens.  Since I don't know when my laptop is going to reboot next, it may be a while before I can test this in the real world scenario I described in my oringal post.  In other words - forcing my laptop to reboot artificially may not be the same thing as when it happens on its own.

Since I do not get any warnings AT ALL when the reboot happens, I am leaning towards ruling-out "Windows Update" as the culprit.  As McKnife indicated, Windows Update will warn you numerous times before rebooting your laptop.  That is not what is happening here.  It is (seemingly) random.

Since it is apparently random - that is why my focus is on detection.  Maybe I cannot control THAT it happens or WHEN it happens - but if I can gather reliable and consistent data (via Event Viewer or some other method) then I can begin to put a plan together on how to resolve this.  My gut is that it is probably a hardware problem (overheating?) except for the fact that it might go for much longer periods of time AFTER it randomly reboots with no problems at all!!!  So if it were overheating - you would think that once it started - it would happen over and over and closer together since whatever was overheating would still be HOT and not given a chance to cool down.

Also - I am not necessarily talking about relying upon Windows to tell me it is going to reboot.  It may not know the reboot is going to happen.

But - depending on the nature of the reboot - there may be a consistent chain of events that happen each time.  Right now those are unknown.  If I can discover them - I may be able to answer this question (plus the help I've received here is helping me to think about possibilities I had not known about)

I am thinking about making better use of the Event Viewer under Administrative Tools.  I have been looking at it after each reboot, but it does not seem to be consistent.  I either need more verbose reporting or I need a tool that is better equipped for troubleshooting problems like this than the Event Viewer is capable of.

I was taking a look at my Event Viewer -System Log (grouping by Level and sorting in descending order) and I noticed that this Critical Error is happeing quite a bit:

 <Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
- <System>
  <Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Kernel-Power" Guid="{331C3B3A-2005-44C2-AC5E-77220C37D6B4}" /> 
  <EventID>41</EventID> 
  <Version>3</Version> 
  <Level>1</Level> 
  <Task>63</Task> 
  <Opcode>0</Opcode> 
  <Keywords>0x8000400000000002</Keywords> 
  <TimeCreated SystemTime="2017-06-28T00:19:20.965271700Z" /> 
  <EventRecordID>28590</EventRecordID> 
  <Correlation /> 
  <Execution ProcessID="4" ThreadID="8" /> 
  <Channel>System</Channel> 
  <Computer>ender</Computer> 
  <Security UserID="66666666666 hidden by me 66666666666666" /> 
  </System>
- <EventData>
  <Data Name="BugcheckCode">0</Data> 
  <Data Name="BugcheckParameter1">0x0</Data> 
  <Data Name="BugcheckParameter2">0x0</Data> 
  <Data Name="BugcheckParameter3">0x0</Data> 
  <Data Name="BugcheckParameter4">0x0</Data> 
  <Data Name="SleepInProgress">0</Data> 
  <Data Name="PowerButtonTimestamp">0</Data> 
  <Data Name="BootAppStatus">0</Data> 
  </EventData>
  </Event>

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David Johnson, CD, MVP:

The checkbox was not checked:

Over heating would cause your problem.. Normally you will get a BSOD first though. Normally one looks at the event logs first, but then again many users don't even know about them.

many cpu's have what is called speed step that attempts to slow the cpu down when it is overheating. This can be disabled in the bios in many cases. Perhaps using something to monitor your cpu temperatures i.e. speedfan might help

Speedfan screenshots:

Online report generated by speed fan:

and what are your cpu temperatures? enable logging and view the log after the computer resets

I am not sure where the log file is for CPU temperatures.

I'll attach some of the generated files
pciidsdata.csv
SFLog20170629.csv
SFLog20170629.csv
SFLog20170630-0001.csv