I noticed that on Windows 7 the yellow shield in the taskbar does not exist and the blue updates icon is hidden away in the notification area. The user will not see it unless they go searching for it to see the hidden icons in the notification area.
If they miss the initial balloon notification, there is no further warning of pending updates and when the installation deadline passes, their laptop will just silently install the updates in the background and then suddenly initiate a reboot with no warning at all. In XP, there was a warning prompt saying the computer will reboot in 5 minutes or 15 minutes etc..
If there is no deadline, the updates simply don't get installed at all because they forget about them or postpone them indefinitely.
They may have no idea that the updates have been downloaded to their laptop for several days waiting for them to install manually prior to the deadline.
Is there any way to configure a GPO to make the "Updates Are Ready" balloon notice to redisplay more than once and/or to force the Windows Updates icon to always appear in the task bar when updates have been downloaded rather than being hidden?