This still isnt always useful. I work in an office that creates and runs CFD software. It often takes days, or weeks to run and the recent windows "feature" of rebooting when it wants to update with no way to shut it off has killed so many peoples work in progress. Its insane there is no ability to only update manually.
Oh, just remembered one more thing. The reboot reminder of Windows Update. You sit there coding at work with 20 windows open, suddenly "Reboot now or wait a little bit?!" and bam "Yup, shut down everything right now!"
It happens especially at work where I can't control how updates are installed...
>I understand why people may dislike being "forced" to do updates, but it's very much Microsoft's monthly flu-shot. Just because you're scared of needles,
I've seen/had it happen too many times that I go to use a classroom or lectern or meeting room PC which someone clicked shut-down instead of log-off and now the PC is indisposed for half an hour or more.
It's also pretty annoying when configuring Windows-guest virtual machines or rather, trying to get a class of students to do it in the allotted time.
What if I'm about to go to a concert, running late and I need to print tickets last minute, and suddenly windows needs to spend 30 minutes updating, without giving me a choice? The fact that you can't stop it in the moment is infuriating. Also, you can't expect the user to manually configure system updates.
Self-updating on Windows is a horrible thing to get right. I wouldn't be surprised if they did this to keep the complexity of the process as low as possible.
Or Get Tailscale in the Windows Store so it could auto update for all the endpoints out in the wild I don't control (company laptops, users home PCs, etc). Trying to get TEN people to manually update today was a pain, I can't imagine even triple that.
Forced updates and reboots are deal breaker for me. There's nothing more frustrating than leaving a long running simulation up all night only to realize that windows rebooted in the middle of the night. Or you need to reboot for some other reason, you're in a hurry, but now windows needs to install 137 updates.
If a job requires me to use windows, I will find another job.
It's not exactly hard to prevent windows 10 from running updates. My security cam server has been running for years with updates only applying when I manually run them.
I do wish that Microsoft made it easier to prevent auto rebooting updates, but you can do it and it's pretty stupid to run a multi-day process without bothering to set up the system correctly and then bitch about it.
While that's true, I'm not sure that I consider it a "problem" in the first place. I used to, but not any longer.
In my experience, there's never a good time to update/reboot. I always have multiple applications and tabs open, and always several tasks in flight.
For many years, I had Windows set to not automatically update. Now, given the rapid speed with which vulnerabilities can be exploited, I'm personally glad that it does.
In a corporate environment, though, as the blog author is in, it's really going to be the IT policies that dictate this. They typically have the ability to update not just Windows, but any other software on the system. And often do.
That's one of the reasons that IT departments do prefer (and sometimes dictate) Windows -- It does make it easier for them to secure the multitude of systems for which they are responsible.
I run programs that cannot afford for windows to tell me I need to shut my computer down especially within certain hours of the day. I'm usually ok but they should set the automatic updates to default but give users some sort of option.
AaronFriel you can only pause for a few weeks and you need to keep doing that in perpetuity. That said, its not so much impossible to work around, its just annoying and feels like an encroachment. If I want to run my PC as a server with near 100% uptime then just let me do it.
moksly, an enterprise license is for 500+ employees and will have a cost to match that.
If an update is ready, Windows (at least as of 10) offers an option to update and shut down when you open the power options menu. The random reboots and periods where the computer is unusable (while it gets updates ready) are still annoying.
Just having interruptible updates and an average time to completion would make me hate MS Windows a little less. Like how hard is it too say "your computer needs updating, it takes 20 minutes on average for other users: continue, snooze, or schedule", then have "complete update later" button.
And do their damnedest to get rid of the half-hour wait on reboot whilst it does unknown evil in the background with no indications of action or time to completion ... yes, I've been burnt!
In recent years, Microsoft has been pushing automatic updates more and more. At the same time, the updating experience just hasn't gotten any better.
My Linux install never urges me to update. Updates come out many times a day, and I can ignore them entirely for as long as I want. My Windows install continually urges me to update. It makes them increasingly hard to ignore, to make sure I install them. The idea behind this is not bad: many people would postpone updates indefinitely without understanding the consequences. Browsers these days install updates without even asking the user, and complaints about that are rare.
The problem is that updating Windows is a terrible experience. It wants to install updates when I shut down, which on a laptop is often the moment I'm leaving, when I'm ready to put it into my bag and go home. This is a terrible time to install updates. It's even worse because the time the updates take is incredibly unpredictable. Sometimes they're done in a minute, but I've also had a single small update take 45 minutes. I ended up putting the laptop into the bag while it was running the update. When I arrived home it was very close to overheating, had burnt through much of the battery capacity (the battery in that thing isn't very good), and it wasn't done yet.
Then I figured the solution would be to avoid updates at shutdown, always executing them manually when I was going to keep using it for a while. This is how I handle updates on Linux, and it works perfectly. So I tried that a few times, and the experience was terrible. It would always require a reboot immediately after, while I was working. This is a terrible time to reboot.
Meanwhile, every time I update my Linux installations, it's painless. I just run the update command, it tells me exactly what it's going to update, I accept, and I can leave it running in the background. The longest one of those updates ever took was 10-15 minutes, on a machine that hadn't been on for 6 months. Hundreds of packages updated in minutes, without disrupting the work I was doing. An hour or so later I shut it down and from the next boot on I was running the newest kernel.
What Microsoft needs to do is to make updates painless. It needs to be clear what is being updated and how long it is going to take. It needs to stop requiring reboots all the time, and when that is achieved it needs to stop updating on shutdown.
Also important: It needs to stop requring multiple reboots for one update round. Windows, for me, is not the OS that boots by default. Every time it restarts I need to explicitly tell my computer that "yes, unfortunately there are still reasons to keep using this."
Classically over-engineered solution to non-existent problem.
Just let the user choose when to update FFS. This isn't rocket science. Yes, some of them will never update, but guess what your forced-update bullshit is leading people to do? That's right, disable the update mechanism and never update.
Please Microsoft, for the love of all that is decent just stop intentionally sucking so damned hard.
Back in the Windows XP days, there was a way of halting forced updates by killing a certain process. I had it as a simple batch file on my desktop. Every time it would come up with "your PC gets restarted in 15 minutes", I'd just double click on it and carry on undisturbed.
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