By default, whenever Windows updates itself, it will attempt to automatically reboot. To be fair, it will present a prompt allowing the user to cancel the automatic reboot for 4 minutes–after which it reboots itself. This may be handy when mass-installing updates for a large installed base, but it’s horribly useless for a development machine or other desktop that may actually have active apps open.

If you don’t want to discover that some unsaved work of yours mysteriously disappeared thanks to this lovely feature, you’ll need to turn it off from gpedit.msc under User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Updates and set the feature No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations to Enabled.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it neglected the primary use case: Most people only ever burn one disc. Whether the drive ejects or not mostly doesn’t matter. It’s not hard to press a button, and it violates the principle of least surprise. Fortunately, most burning software now is becoming a little smarter: They give you the choice. Admittedly, it’s buried in the configs somewhere, but they do give you a choice.

My computer case has a panel on the front to open that gives you access to drives of whatever sort. I have that same problem all of the time with burner programs of nearly every sort. Its an annoyance, but over time I’ve come to accept it.