OK, I am probably stupid, but I have the automatic “update” control set to “on” and I swear, EVERY FUCKING DAY there are at least five of them!
I get my little bubble on the bottom of my computer screen letting know there are yet more updates…so I look them over and every one is yet another “security update”.
Seriously, can you hold off a day or two? Can you finally make a damned security update that is, I donno, SECURE for an hour?
I suppose I should appreciate the effort, but at this rate, I am going to need 74 million gigs of hard drive just to keep this crap downloading!
What pisses me off is that they force you to either stay at the computer or face an automatic reboot. The little window comes up saying “automatically rebooting in 5 minutes”. There’s an option for “reboot manually” or something, but when you press it it just gives you an hour or two, if that long, before the stupid thing pops up again. So it doesn’t matter if you have stuff you want to leave open overnight - if you leave your computer on, it’s going to reboot.
I agree it’s a bit of an inconvenience and I wish XP was less prone to attacks. Fresh installs don’t finish updating for days, it seems. However, I think you’re directing your ire at the wrong people.
As someone who has had to clean up machines for my friends and families, if I ever met someone in real life who admitted to writing malware, Very Bad Things would happen.
It sounds a bit like one update is failing to install and is being continually re-pushed. Usually they put out their updates in blocks on Patch Tuesday, so continual notifications are generally a sign that something’s going wrong.
Try going to the windows update site through IE (http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/), run through an update process from there and see what happens (you may have to let it update the updater first). It ought to tell you if a particular update has failed. What you do from there depends a bit on which one it is, I suppose. You can mark particular items to not download, and it’ll stop bugging you about them in future. Or you can download individual patches from the corresponding knowledgebase article sometimes; installing them separately has worked for me in the past.
Or how about the other night when I was trying to shut down the computer because we had thunder and lightning in the area (I use a UPS, but I also don’t like to take chances), and yup, Windows had to install all the updates – SEVEN of them – before it would shut down. It was like Peter in Office Space trying to get out before the boss found him.
Now I’m wondering if I’m getting updates that I should be getting, because I can’t remember the last time I had gotten any sort of update notice from Windows. I’m running XP, and I’m pretty sure I have my system set up to automatically check for updates.
I’m not up on the contents of the paches but it would not shock me if part of it was due to a run of pretty nasty virus/spyware items the last few weeks. We seem to have had a little run on swen worm that the AV stuff would break all executable file associations in the process of pulling it out.
You may have it set to automatically download and install updates as well.
Mine checks automatically for updates, but i have set it so that it will not download or install the updates unless i give my approval. It’s possible to completely automate the process so you never see an update notice, and that might be what your computer is set to do.
This happened to me two days ago so I googled until I figured out a way to turn it off. Go to your command prompt, type “net stop “automatic updates”” (automatic updates in quotes). It’ll turn off the prompt and force restart but it will still update your computer next time you restart.
Yeah, but at least Windows has never pushed multiple gigs of updates on me at once. My boss was so not happy when he booted up a freshly installed OSX to be bombarded with that many updates…
Apple can go screw. Every time there’s a Quicktime update, they’re pushing out iTunes and Safari with it. At least Microsoft doesn’t send me a bunch of completely unrelated crap.
You should have the option to shut down without installing updates. In the screen where you choose from shutdown, restart or hibernate, if you have a pending update install, there should be a link (in text) below those icons that will let you.
I hate how having Quicktime requires you to have shitty iTunes on your computer too. And the recent addition of Safari is even more annoying.
I get around this by using Media Player Classic and Quicktime Alternative. Allows me to play .mov files, embedded video, etc. without having iTunes, and without the actual Quicktime software. Quicktime is, like much of Apple’s software, fine on a Mac but pretty crappy on a PC.
Saturday afternoon I downloaded and installed Microsoft’s latest patches and updates. Since then, I’ve been unable to log in to LJ through either Firefox or Internet Explorer, and I keep having to re-login to the Dope. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a cookie problem, but ZoneAlarm Pro is set to accept cookies from both sites, so I’m baffled.
If anyone has any ideas, let me know. I’m considering deinstalling those dratted patches.
Edited to Add: I just shut ZoneAlarm down, and everything works fine. Which means I have to check ZoneAlarm instead. Oh, joy. Oh, rupture.
I don’t allow updates, and have not since SP2 nearly destroyed my computer. It means I can’t play any game that requires SP2, but it’s not worth having my computer go snakeshit when I try to download. I’m heavy on the spyware, adware and firewall protection, and prefer to take my chances.
