Motherfucking Windows you bastard piece of fuckety fuck!!!

The BBQ Pit
#1

:mad::mad::mad:

Project due tomorrow in an 8 am class. Working diligently trying to get everything done. Two computers, one running a compiler and one with a Word document. All of a sudden they both start shutting down WITH NO GODDAMN WARNING WHATSOEVER.

Then they both boot back up and I get the nice little note that windows had to restart the computer after installing updates.

Everything is gone!!! THere is not enough time to restart and get finished.

:mad::mad::mad:

What the fuck, microsoft. How in the hell is this the default behaviour? What idiot in Redmond thought this was a good idea? Do you people not live in the real world where people have deadlines they have to meet?

:mad::mad::mad:

Yeah, I know I should save often. Yeah I know you can turn off the automatic installation of updates. Truth is, I didn’t think about it until now. You can bet your ass that the stupid fucking automatic updates is turned off now!

If only I could get my work back.:(:frowning:

#2

After having lost all of my documents not once, not twice, but three times because I thought “I’ll just wait until I’ve done xx to back everything up” before Windows had a catastrophic crash and required a full system restore…

I’ve still got no sympathy. It was my own dumbass fault for not backing up my docs and files, and SESO is a catechism that anyone using a computer should live by :slight_smile:

#3

I learned the hard way to develop a ‘nervous tic’:

OK, finished that paragraph. [CTRL-S]

Hmm, thinking about what’s the right word to put in here… [CTRL-S]

Scratching my balls. [CTRL-S]

Oh look! A badger! [CTRL-S]

Just gonna get myself a coffee… [CTRL-S] [Drag ‘n’ drop file to external disk]

Since I started doing this ten years ago, I haven’t lost a thing (except when I’ve inadvertently overwritten a file with one of the same name, from which there is no fucking recovery, thanks a lot Bill Gates).

OP, depending on how important it is to you, remedial measures for your current problems: take out the computer’s hard drive and plug it into the slave IDE port in a desktop (if it’s an IDE disk), OR, particularly if it’s a laptop disk, get one of those little disk mounting boxes from Radio Shack that turns your HD into a USB disk and recover the file that way.

ETA: for $5 per month there’s now also this handy little backup tool from Google.

#4

Thanks for the tip, but I don’t think it’s going to help get everything done before 8 am. Also, if I never saved anything (stupid, stupid stupid) it wouldn’t be on the hard drive in any way, shape, or form anyway.

#5

Holy shit, way worse than I thought. I have to concur with your parentheses. :wink:

Best of luck man.

#6

More tips… Save often, natch. Change the name after any major change, add a letter or number to the end. For shared files, like with a team, change the name immediately, have different names for each contributor. I only needed to overwrite the master file once to learn that one.

I also hate automatic updates and their stupid restarts. Always seems to hit when I have a hot deadline or urgent request that I can’t put off.

#7

Not to mention that the auto updates slow the PC to a motherfucking crawl. And “unexpected results may occur” :rolleyes: Last week I tried to use Excel while an Excel update was (unknown to me) downloading. No warnings, Excel started sorta fine, but would not open files. Lost a DAY’S WORK TIME while the helpdesk got Excel AND Outlook :confused: fixed. Why in the sacred name of Turing does anyone anywhere pay money for insecure non-designed M$ crap?

#8

I’m certainly no fan of MS :rolleyes: , but what you describe could be a hardware error – overheating, unreliable power source, whatever.

#9

Ehr, no, he describes further down that it was automatic updates.

I hate those things, do Macs have a more reasonable way of dealing with updates?

#10

Is this like Windows 95 or something? I can’t recall my PC not warning me about restarting for updates, with the option to delay it like an hour.

#11

Auto updating is one of the most evil of the MS inventions. Even if you don’t lose any program data its a giant pain in the ass when the computer suddenly announces that whatever you are doing isn’t worth shit and updates are starting now.

I finally changed my update status to “notify” and took it off full automatic.

It’s nice that you have an option to configure for a less dangerous operating environment but the “permissions first” options should be the default and if you are lunatic enough to want full updates then you can reset it to full auto.

#12

You worked for hours on something and never saved it?

I have no sympathy for you. There are a dozen different ways you could have lost your stuff, regardless of if you were using Windows, Mac, Linux, or any other electronic gizmo. The power goes out. The dog steps on the power strip and turns everything off (hey, it happened to me last week!). You spill coffee on your keyboard and it becomes completely unresponsive. You hit a wrong key and accidentally turn Word off. The monitor stops working and goes black. Zombies attack.

I can understand being pissed off that you lost your work, but I hardly see it as Microsoft or Windows fault. It’s your own fault.

Also - how did you lose your Word doc? Did you turned off the autosave feature in Word? I can’t remember the last time Word died unexpectedly and I didn’t have an autosave copy available for recovery.

#13

I agree. In my experience, Windows XP/Vista/7 never restarts the computer on its own for updates.

#14

Windows XP did indeed restart on its own for updates. It would prompt you to install updates for a while, but then if you didn’t accept, ultimately it would just do it on its own. Usually overnight in my case, so I’d leave the computer on and come back in the morning to find that it had rebooted with a cheerful little message about “I had to reboot to install updates!” or whatever. I turned it off eventually. After years of Windows use, I have the same nervous tic that jjimm describes (I’ve tried to Ctrl-S this post twice already, no lie) so I don’t have to worry about losing documents, but it was still pretty annoying that the computer will ever reboot on its own without being prompted.

And no, to answer Nava’s question, Macs do not do this. When OS X detects an update, it pops up the System Updates app, and you can choose to either install updates or not, and if you don’t, it goes away until either another update arrives, or you specifically choose to open it and install updates. (For all I know, this is how Vista and 7 work too. The most recent Windows version I’m familiar with is XP.)

#15

I rely on a 12-button mouse (and would heartily recommend one to anyone who works on a computer all day), and the easiest gesture–left nudging of the wheel–is set to save. The twitch is so bad (good) that almost any mouse movement yields a save with zero interrupt to hit Ctrl-S. I know it’s a scintilla of improvement, but remember, never go against a Scintillian when a project is on the line!

Also, go in and change auto-save settings to 1-minute increments.

Also-also, thanks for the Google link.

#16

Do you hit CTRL-S when you’re done writing a forum post? I do that all the time. I also do it when I’m altering a SQL stored procedure, which to “save” you are supposed to “execute” not CTRL-S.

#17

Nope Windows 7 explicitly does this as well. I left my new PC on last night with documents open… and this morning I was presented with a login screen and then a message that updates had rebooted my PC. not a big problem. I had saved everything. But 7 can and will shutdown regardless of current status in order to apply updates as its default behavior.

#18

That’s the end result but if you’re sitting there working you get a window that says it needs to reboot to finish the installation and you have the option to delay it or manual reboot later.

Should you ignore the message it reboots itself 15 mins later.

#19

Yeah, and I don’t know what’s worse:

the programs who let the popup do its thing, so it pops up in the middle of whatever I’m doing aaaaaghgetthisthingoutofmyface! Oh, wait. Clicks on ‘remind me in 3 hours’
or those which don’t, so after 15 minutes the computer goes whooooosh and reboots.

The second ones, I guess, but damnit it’s obnoxious in any case :stuck_out_tongue: I’d like to have an option of “since I shut the computer down at least once a day, just run updates when I shut it down”.

A lot of their updates work like that, I just can’t see why don’t they all. Yeah, there is people who like having the computer heating their room 24/7, but I’m not one of them, I’d like to be able to take advantage of the shut-downs.

#20

I haven’t been on a Windows box for a number of years now, but I couldn’t believe they would make this default behavior. That just sounds asinine to me.