<rant>
I use a Mac and a PC. This week I am hating my PC. What it is doing is not new. And I am sure there is a fix available from some buried instructions or some hacker that has figured out how to disable it. But I *hate* the fact that when a new security update comes in over the wire that it decides on its own, when no one is looking, that it needs to reboot. Yeah yeah, its for my own "protection."
It feels almost fascist.
It’s like you have no control. We at Microsoft control your universe. Your will is my command.
F. U.
You can think you are taking whatever precautions you want to protect my work, but at the end of the day you have no way of knowing that rebooting my PC is safe. You may very well be doing *far* more harm than good by rebooting my machine without my permission.
The fact that there is no obvious, surface level interface control for controlling this “feature” is unconscionable. At the very least when they do it the first time they ought to tell you how to control it.
Microsoft sucks.
</rant>
Have a great weekend.
Friday, April 11, 2008
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9 comments:
I wrote about the same today; the difference is that I said Windows sucks!!! I am also planning to come up with a series of post to "Bleed out" Microsoft and the f - Windows...!!
This is what I wrote - Look who's bleeding!
If it is your own PC then turn off automatic updates. If it is a corporate PC then your IT department controls this feature.
I was going to say the same as anonymous.
You have control over how your PC handles updates from MS. I have mine set to notify me only. I then go and install the updates at my leisure (and reboot my machine even more leisurely).
Ok, so where is the control hiding. And wherever it is, how in God's name could you *by default* reboot the computer without asking. And then how do you not, in the same place where you notify me that you did it, tell me how to change the status. In my user interface articles I refer to this as action at a distance, this is the worst possible manifestation of it.
I was furious the first time I got bitten by this on XP. It's not fun leaving a job to run overnight, fully expecting it to be done in the morning, and finding instead (after having to delve into the system logs) it rebooted at 3 am.
Hank, you're just right. There is no excuse for an OS to behave like that by default.
To me, this is just the same class of suckage like when the xp explorer doesn't let you delete files because it thinks that some process would still have access to it (which is mostly not the case). It's a "who t.f. is the owner of this f*** pc"-thing. And the owner is obviously not us.
I guess it's this experience that makes me just love ubuntu linux and its "sudo" command: "super user do" ... and he does. Being a MS Windows user, using an OS that actually gives you control over your own system feels no less than magic!
Of course, it's intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that you'd have to go to "Security Center" in order to set your windows update settings. (When I have to go hunt around to find it when I already found it once and changed the setting, that's kind of the definition of suck.) Anyway, go to "Security Center" and then from there "Automatic Updates", and in there you can set it to either do nothing, or automatically download the updates and then ask you whether to install them, which is how I have it set.
There was a time when I had a remote machine which would hang waiting for F5 in the BIOS every time it rebooted, so every time a windows update was pushed out, it would be dead and I'd either have to come into the office or call someone and have them go into the server room and press F5...that's when I got around to finding the setting.
Of course, if you're running something other than XP, the setting is surely in a completely different place.
Thanks...this was bugging me too. I just changed my settings.
Does MS ever talk to customers?
Yup,i always keep my automatic update Off, even if that annoying red mark stays on my system tray. but sometimes, when new problem arises, some of the XP solution is found in the auto update, thats the time i turn it ON or go to their site and custom select what i want to update.
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