Microsoft does a lot of things that piss me off, but this little stunt always fills me with white-hot murderous rage:
Windows decides you can't shut off your laptop until it finishes dinking around
I’m at the end of a meeting and need to bolt to another meeting. Sure, I should just close the lid and let it go to sleep but suppose I accidentally hit the wrong button to shut it down instead? And it says; “Sorry, you can’t shut down your machine for a half-hour or more, or you’ll face a rebuild.” So I have to keep it powered up long enough to finish this nonsense – and it can hang on a particular update for just about any length of time. In this case, forty minutes or so.
Of course when I turned the system back on, it said “Preparing to configure Windows updates” and restarted itself a couple times before it would let me do anything. OK, fine – that was ten more minutes. Then when I went to shut it down again? Three more updates. And then “Preparing to configure…” again when it started up. All with the warning “Do not turn off your computer”.
Um, Windows? Were you planning to let me use my computer anytime soon?
When I’m using Linux (often on the same machine) it never does anything this rude. It lets me know when it wants to install updates and then I decide. Oh, and one other thing: I can actually install updates in Linux while I’m doing other things. No worries about freezing up or unexpected shutdowns.
Microsoft, I paid for your damn operating system and you can’t even do as well as one that’s free?
I love the update that isn’t compatible and yet you still get interrupted for its installation. Make you wish you could just say don’t bother!!!!
When I worked for (a large consulting company who shall remain nameless), I would simply start my shutdown cycle about 1 hour before I expected to go home. Why? I wasn’t allowed to turn off the updates, but I had a specific time when I had to leave to fetch my kids from daycare. Suffice it to say, I no longer work for that company.
Ummm, changing this behavior is simple: Go to control panel, type “Windows update”, the 2nd item down should be “Turn automatic updating on or off”. Change the setting to whatever you would like. Now, you can explicitly choose when you’d like to install updates.
But I guess thats not as much fun as complaining about it.
Quite right, Sam, and on personally-owned laptops I do get ’round to making that adjustment. Usually after being blindsided by it right after purchase.
However it has happened to me when using institutionally-owned laptops as well, where I don’t control the settings. The point you missed was that, while automatic updates are desirable (because most enterprise users do not have admin permissions to install them, or wouldn’t even if they did have the permissions), having them hijack the machine for long periods of time while threatening to brick the machine is really, really bad computer behavior. Surely Microsoft could install the updates without sidelining the computer at unpredictable intervals. But I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun by pointing that out.