In today’s America you own your laptop about as much as a baker owns his hands.
As a now-retired IT director, I am surprised at the posts that talk about updates being performed at the next reboot, or in the next 15 minutes, or some other inconvenient time for the end user. We (the IT staff) controlled when updates would be applied. When we received notification of a pending update, we would test it on several machines and make sure that all software behaved properly after the update. Once we deemed it okay for release, we would ‘push’ the update to all workstations and schedule it to happen at 4:00 am or some other time when nobody should be working. We would also publish the update schedule, so people would know why their computer rebooted itself in the middle of the night.
And we used tools by Microsoft to accomplish this.
The PC I use for a community organization I help run is on Win10 and it took about half an hour to boot up last night, almost certainly because it had been powered off for a couple weeks and had a backlog of updates to install and configure. It was a new machine that I set up a few months ago, direct from HP as part of a general refresh I did on the office(new PC, cable provider, 30X faster downloads than the old DSL line, retired the old inkjet too, and a keyboard with all the letters visible instead of worn off). It took so long to boot up that one of other officers of the board said “I guess this is our new faster network, huh?” The reality is the new PC is faster, and the network is MUCH faster, but we’re expecting more of it. The old stand-alone Win7 PC wasn’t phoning home all the time and it didn’t have nearly as many services running on it. This bloatware is crippling us in lots of ways and most people don’t even know it.
Enjoy,
Steven
Actually, the phone company did hunt for illicit phones. I know because my father worked for New England Telephone* starting shortly after he got out of the Navy following World War II, entering as a lineman, ending as a foreman. At one point in his working life he was posted to a van that went around sniffing somehow for non-NET phones and then (under what legal authority I dunno; I was a child when he was telling us about all this) searching houses for the nonsubscribed telephone sets. I recall him telling us at the dinner table about finding phones hidden in refrigerators.
That was a very different world.
- Or whatever the name was way back then. Dad got the job because his father-in-law was a longtime phone company employee who’d wired for initial service some of the great resort hotels in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, back a century or so ago.
Man, now I’m thinking I should update something. I do have a work laptop, and i grudgingly admit they own it, but I still upgrade it manually on my own schedule (or if I’m lazy I back everything up, take it in to the IT guys and say “Here, it’s a couple of versions behind in everything. Good luck.”)
But MY computers are still running old OSes. Partly out of caution at not wanting to load an OS til I’ve read about the problems… and part me being curmudgeonly. They’re macs, and I’ve never gotten an auto-update request or warning. If that’s a thing, I’ll have to be sure to find out how to opt-out.
It’s MY computer, dirtwads. If I want to run Snow Leopard on my Pismo PowerBook and MacOS System 9 on my Cube, that’s none of Timmy Cook’s business.
Maybe it wasn’t clear in my post… this wasn’t Microsoft’s fault, this is how our own corporate IT department pushes out updates.
Your tools, as an individual, may be less stable or have less uptime today than in the past, but as a society we have much more reliable infrastructure than we had in the past AND we do much more with it BECAUSE it’s much more reliable. For all their competition-crushing and money-grubbing faults, Microsoft has made huge stability and performance strides in the past few years. Taking people off the yearly upgrade grind has been a huge boon to most of us. Vulnerabilities are addressed in days or hours instead of years or months. This is one of those “can’t see the forest cause of all the damn trees in the way” kind of times in PC history.
Enjoy,
Steven
I also get annoyed by Windows updating itself when it wants to, but…
The alternative to Microsoft “owning” your laptop, in terms of dictating how the software updates itself isn’t you owning your laptop, it’s some virus, worm, or script kiddie owning it.
The threat landscape for connected-to-the-internet devices is vast, and vanishingly few people are qualified to reasonably secure a computer.
Yes, you can put Linux on it. Better stay on top of your updates, though, or someone else will gain root pretty quick.
If you move to Linux then you need to be a responsible adult and do your own updates, management, etc.
If you can’t be bothered you probably are better off with Windows10.
You can set Linux up to install updates automatically. You can also set it up not to update automatically, if you so choose.
This is what Quicken has gone to. And it’s damn near impossible to find a game for your PC that doesn’t run through some server or other, even if it’s just a stupid one player classic like SimCity. So yeah, nobody says you HAVE to agree to giving free reign of your stuff to a faceless corp–your option is to simply not have a computer. Or cell phone.
I think setting up your own WSUS or SCCM server is a bit daunting for the average user… 
(I get your point, there are options, but obviously what you used at your company isn’t going to make sense for home users.)
And it’s this that really angers me. Even with things you own (smart phones, cars), they don’t want you to be able to fix or tinker with them.
Whenever I meet people who feel oppressed by the government I point out that I feel way more oppressed by private industry. It’s now very, very difficult to hang on to software that actually works because your operating system has been “improved” and updated to the point where it won’t run it anymore. This pisses me off. Where is the crazy militia that’s hoarding Windows XP motherboards against the time when we truly have no control over our computers?
Oh, without a doubt, using WSUS would be just a tad much for most people, including me.
My post was primarily in response to post #13, where Shoeless said
This type of situation should never occur with a competent and reliable IT department.
In my home experience, configuring Windows 10 to honor my ‘Active Hours’ setting for updating and rebooting has worked just fine.
I complain about MS all the time but they did a lot of things right with Windows 10.
If you take the time to configure updates they won’t be disruptive. I’ve had it since before official release (I was lucky enough to get an advance copy at a seminar) and it has never been an inconvenience for me.
For those who can’t be troubled to set up their update system, Microsoft pushes the updates at you on their own schedule, because frankly you aren’t going to do it properly yourself.
This is basically my experience. I’ve never had Win 10 do an update against my will while I’m doing something else. It just makes an announcement–something like, “It’s time to do an update–now, or postpone?” I postpone it, and instead of shutting down, I use hibernate. Then, when I don’t need to use the computer for anything, I do an actual restart, and let it update.
Well, thank god for that. Because, being that I’m lying in bed alone right now, and will soon be doing something fun with both of them, it would be a tragedy if I did not own them.
Fiddling with your peghead?
It’s called “someone is reading a verb and thinking it’s an adjective”. It’s a button you click to change your status to that one the button says, not an indication of your current status.
Considering I just started working on the computer at 2AM local time today, and will probably be running some lengthy, CPU-intensive processing in the next few hours, your schedule would be quite inconvenient for me.
You know what’s the least disruptive? NO UPDATES!
Haven’t tried that, but I will.
There are some videos on YT that purport to prevent updates completely, using multiple approaches. They don’t, not even if all of them are implemented.
It doesn’t work.
As someone who ran XP for 15 years on multiple computers with not a single update from start, I beg to differ. They may be useful for the uninformed, but are useless and very annoying for the professional. Get rid of the auto-updates and I will gladly take the risk.