Mine waited quietly for me the other night…
I kept getting the “Would you like to restart now?”
I said “Later.”
“Later.”
“Later.”
“Later.”
“LATER.”
I was in a raid on EQII, so “later” will have to do.
I went AFK to quickly use the washroom…
sigh
Time to fix that. There. Done. :smack:
I said no.
Windows did it anyway!
I thought no meant NO!
Glad to see I’m not the only one suffering from that Microsuck foolishness.
I’ve got Windows 2000 (as someone else mentioned), so it’s not confined just to XP.
I think it is typical Microsoft behavior and inefficiency to be so cavalier about whether their products work properly or not.
Basically, their unofficial corporate slogan is “We’re Microsoft - Go Fuck Yourself”.
I thought they did it for you, saving you the trouble of going self-service?
Turn off Automatic Updates - the thing is an evil liar.
Laptop, fully updated using Windows Update, remains unused for a month in my cupboard while the user was away travelling. Before he returns, I decide to power it up and charge-cycle the battery - I do not connect it to the network.
The Automatic Updates applet in the system tray claims 'New updates are ready for your computer, click here to download them". How does it know? How the fuck does it know?!?*
*Answer: It doesn’t - it’s lying - what it actually means is “Shit! a month has passed since you last updated, there’s bound to be some newly-discovered security flaw that needs patching, can we please take a look?”
I don’t really have anything to add other than “Fucking A”. I hate it when anything takes control of my computer away from me. Shit, I’ve seen better behaved viruses than this automatic reboot crap.
FYI, on the second tuesday of every month, Microsoft release their non-critical patches and updates, as well as the latest version of their malware scrubber. ‘Patch Tuesday’ is a day of joy for network admins everywhere.
So is it actually the passing of that date that provokes the Automatic Updates service (on a computer isolated from the internet) to say that there are updates waiting to be downloaded?
Anyone still having problems, I strongly recommend reading Shalmanese’s blog page on this (cheers for that, by the way), as there are a few settings you can fiddle with to mitigate the problem. You can turn off the response timeout, so your computer will never reboot without you telling it to, and you can increase the prompt delay from the current 5 minutes to 24 hours. That way you don’t have the insecurity of turning off the updates, but they’re not nearly as insistent about the rebooting.
It’s Microsoft. There’s no real way of knowing what they meant it to do, or if what it actually does is what they intended it to do. The only certainty is that it will be more irritating than Tabasco sauce in your pile ointment.
Heck, that’s just good software design. No need to bother tying up network communications or linking in any network libraries if you don’t need to ;).
I’ve got a lovely program (Mushclient) that actually refuses to shut down automatically, putting a prompt up when the box tries to reboot. Choosing “do not close” leaves the computer perfectly stable for weeks.