All the fun of being part of a botnet!
But if I’m part of a botnet it must be one that has escaped the detection of numerous AV and malware apps, regular full-disk scanning, and somehow also manages to get through the outbound firewall. It must be one that even manages to do this without any activity in the router log, which is a completely separate device. Any bot that can do this frankly deserves to take over the world and I’m not going to stop it, and sure as hell none of Billy’s updates are going to, either. 
And somehow you think you are saving effort or downtime by refusing to let Windows Update automatically do its thing in the background. :rolleyes:
Why not just set up Windows update to only install essential updates and never look at it again? The optional updates seem to be all useless stuff like Bing toolbar and Swahili dictionary revisions. You will still get security patches, and you do not have to do anything.
I haven’t noticed essential updates breaking anything.
I thought it said “Bling Bra” and was expecting a webpage for Magicians’ Assistants.
There’s a few things in the “non-essential” updates that, IMO, are important and should be in the essential/important ones.
Like new Windows Defender definitions, updates to graphics cards/drivers, etc…
Although it’s not a permanent solution, when you see the"Bing Bar" in the updates list, you can right-click and choose “hide this update.”
You’ll then have a couple months of it not showing up in the updates list, but it eventually comes back. I have a feeling it shows back up whenever they push an update to it.
What you want to achieve is more correctly called, Bing Badda Boom!
I manually check Windows Update and install only what I want installed. So I keep hiding Bing and it keeps coming back wanting to be installed.
What version of Windows are you guys seeing this on? I haven’t seen a Bing toolbar update the entire time I’ve had this Windows 7 computer (at least six months or so). And I just checked, and it is not installed or anything.
I did have to hide the Internet Explorer 11 update, but that has stayed hidden for months now.
Microsoft is just trying to give their users extra support.
Windows 7 SP1 never worked for me. My laptop would refuse to boot with it installed. I had to reverse it through System Restore once, and the other time I had to reinstall Win 7.
So I just used ‘Hide Update’ option and it never shows me SP1 in its list of updates. You can do the same with Bing bar as well. It will never show up in the list again.
BTW, my laptop is chugging along happily without SP1.
Really.
I was playing a live cash game of (full screen) poker on a friends computer and it restarted, and spent about half an hour installing a painful and seemingly unending cascade of updates. Nevertheless by the time the computer finally booted back into windows, a long time had passed and the game was long over, costing me money.
My guess is that if you are running a fullscreen application then a “warning” may well be suppressed. In other words if the “warning” is not displayed… is it a warning?
Regardless 2 or all 3 of those points are not exactly true in all cases.
On a related topic MS seem to change browser search engine defaults when updating. I’ve not yet seen a way to prevent this. Today after an update ie11 seemed to be blocking me changing ‘bing search’ to ‘google search’. I had to research a workaround where I had to add google search via an ie7 add-on page; on the default ie11 add search provider / add-on page, ‘google search’ kept giving an error identical to this bit on windows 8:
There is no mention of MS changing the setting in the ‘update history’.
Personally it seems dodgy that MS change search provider, and awful that it can leave you in a state where it requires research to use google search. It’s playing the same game as malware, hijacking it’s own browser with bing. Of course I can use another browser and I often use chrome… but some sites work better with ie and others with chrome. MS may not (yet) legally have to make other search providers easily available (with no errors / workarounds (re: multiple forums)) but it’s something they ‘should’ do if they want respect of the end user… It’s these problems that give apple fanboys their little bits of mud to throw (although as we all should know, apple isn’t exactly trouble free 
;))
I have noticed that the Bing Bar hides in some software, also. If you select ‘standard install’ you’ll get lots of crap including the Bing Bar from some software (especially stuff from CNET)’ Best to select ‘custom install’ and deselect any crap you don’t want.
Bob