This auto update nuked me a few times before I realized what was going on.
I have a simulation that I run sometimes for days or weeks at a time - kind of annoying to wake up in the morning, check the progress and realize it’s rebooted.
There are actually lots of people in between that have many years of experience with all kinds of different environments and operating systems and can appreciate the pros and cons of all of the OS’s you listed.
I use an OS.
I also use applications.
And, as I perform some tasks in one OS, I am often aware that the same task can be performed much more easily in some other OS, or isn’t even required at all due to different design decisions. Windows isn’t bad, but it has some real weaknesses.
Exactly what i said. Read the post i made a few posts after the one you quoted.
It would have restarted, and my Word document would have popped back up, just like it did in my test. I would have returned to my computer to find the document Autosaved and open on my computer. Which is exactly what happened on my own computer.
Furthermore, i’m not retarded enough to leave my computer for lunch or a meeting without saving my work. Are you?
Ah, yes. I understand. If Word is all you are using, then the auto-recover feature should have you set. The problem crops up, as I pointed out, if one is running some resource-intensive professional program that runs for an extended period of time and the save feature is not available mid-operation, and the operation itself cannot be interrupted without data loss. Which is what Windows does. All. The. Time.
What if you are retarded enough to use windows to run simulations for days or weeks at a time? Autosave doesn’t really help a retard in that case, does it?
It doesn’t, but someone that retarded should know well enough to change the settings in Windows Update.
I remember back in about 2003 there were advice articles on the internet with titles like, “The first 10 things you should do after you install Windows,” and even then one of the top recommendations was to change the settings in Windows Update.
I can understand forgetting to do it when you first get the computer, but surely you’d look into it after the first time it happened. Windows seems to need to apply a new update every week or so, and so even if you forget to change Windows Update initially, the first time your computer restarts without warning should be your clue to go in and change the settings.
As others have argued, it would be better if the default setting were “Tell me when updates are available, but don’t download or install them,” but it isn’t. This problem, however, is trivially easy to avoid.
…what the hell kind of program, professional or not, has to run for an extended period of time, has no ability to save in the middle, and cannot be interrupted without data loss?
Sounds to me like you’re cursing out the wrong programmers…
Well, you’re obviously not a professional computer user if you’ve never run a “catastrophic system failure” simulator.
Not necessarily. I’ve had seriously complex Excel spreadsheets that took up to two hours to finish their calculations. And hosed all other programs while they did it.
A lot of graphics rendering behaves like this too.
Half the quantum chemistry programs I used in graduate school… no, I don’t think their programmers were particularly good. And then there were those nifty excel/access datachecks, the ones I got permission to run at home because simply the ctrl-Hs I had to do in Word before being able to load the files in a workable state took over four hours…
I personally think the entire problem is the Saving concept, something that is fundamentally unintuitive to humans. It’s not how our brain works, and it’s not how things work in real life. And, if I remember correctly, Mac OS X Lion is pushing towards autosave, after doing so on mobile for a while. And Microsoft’s Windows 8 is playing catchup on this regard.
And, yes, Windows Side By Side, even if it were Windows’s only mistake, would be enough reason to say Windows is mediocre at best. It’s an actual bonified disk leak. How can you design something like that without also designing a way to remove unneeded files, let alone deliberately making it near impossible?
Sometime last week, Windows Updates secretly reset my laptop to automatically download and install updates, neither of which I ever allow it to do. I closed the lid to hibernate it, and when I opened it the next day, it had updated and rebooted itself. Fortunately I had saved everything.
That is exactly the point - the default setting is poor.
Not only is the default setting exactly wrong, but Microsoft will of its own volition change the setting back to the wrong one without confirming or even reporting it. You do not control your computer, Microsoft does.
Huh. Hadn’t known about some of those programs. I guess the market is small enough that they can get away with it - and those who need those programs, really need them, and thus will put up with their quirks. And I agree that the default setting has its faults. Still, I suspect that many who complain about losing work do to not saving, are the same people who wouldn’t do the updates unless their hand were forced - and complain about getting caught by vulnerabilities that had been patched, but hadn’t been patched on their computers because they hadn’t done the updates.
However, Microsoft has heard your cries in the wilderness, and will be changing the way the update-restart cycle will work in Windows 8.
I’m still running Vista, and I’ve never experienced that.
I fight bought a computer with Vista on it immediately after that version of of Windows was released. Within two days it stopped working – not because of any mechanical problems, but because the automatic update had downladed a buggy driver. Once I got that fixed I changed the update setting to “Don’t download a fucking thing, and I will check once a week or so to see if there’s anything I need,” and I have never regretted it.
This is a very nice user interface, assuming you haven’t just stepped out for a 16 minute coffee break. This would have been a more instructive experiment if after getting the message, you simulated going on a 15 minute errand and then checked to see if your file had been saved before Windows rebooted.
Before I discovered how to turn off automatic updating, I would come into work in the morning and find my machine had mysteriously shut itself down overnight, so if I were in the process of debugging or coding something, I’d have to restore the whole state of my work environment before I could get any work done. It really is a terrible default to ever allow a machine to unilaterally shut itself down, even if it does give you a 15 minute warning.
If you’ll look at the subsequent post that i made, you’ll see that i did exactly that.
I allowed the computer to restart itself, while leaving my Word document open on the desktop and without saving the document. When the computer restarted, the first thing that happened was that Word fired up and loaded the document that i had been working on. The loaded version was the autosaved version, and it contained all the information that i had typed into it. I lost nothing.
Yes, that’s nice, but you have to realize that there are thousands of Windows apps that do not have any sort of auto recover feature built in. Mainly because it’s really difficult for developers to write code to handle how to save current data at any random point in time that any outside entity (Windows itself) might feel like destroying at any random line of code being executed.
At any rate, just because you typed “asdf asdf” into a Word doc, Windows auto restarted itself and after the whole ordeal your “asdf asdf” survived intact is irrelevant.
Also, as mentioned upthread and confirmed by multiple users, even if you are a diligent and careful Windows user, Microsoft will change your update settings through updates themselves. If this hasn’t happened to you, it only means that you aren’t observant enough to notice these changes.
In any case, it sounds like you are only familiar with Windows and nothing else,and a pretty light Windows user at that. Moral of the whole story is that in a well-designed and well-engineered operating system software updates do not require a restart. Windows is none of this so here we are.
Fundamentally all of this is caused by the Windows Side By Side feature as I mentioned upthread. It defies explanation the reason for the design decisions taken when this feature was implemented, and if you don’t understand much about computers and programming, it’s difficult to explain accurately what it is. “Cancer” and “built-in Trojan” are fairly accurate though.
Considering I’ve got a Masters degree in Computer Science, and 20 years career working in IT, developing software/designing deployments of hardware for environments including VAX, AIX, AS/400, BSD, Windows, Mac OS, various flavours of Unix and some really quite weird legacy shit, I like to think that I qualify as reasonably conversant on matters OS.
Windows is alright. Some nasties in it, for sure, but nothing that isn’t well recorded, and usually easy to work around. Even some of the more questionable default behaviour actually tends to work ok for some more common install environments. A lot of home users don’t know shit about patches and updates, and these days there’s very good security reasons to err on the side of just installing and rebooting. See also SME business environments. Most of the defaults in Windows are pretty much defined for such markets.
One thing I am curious about though. Just what is this well designed OS that never requires a reboot for an update? There’s some nifty utilities for minimising required reboots, but the best one I’ve seen (ksplice) only worked for88% of updates.
As for the OP…sorry bud, but self inflicted.