if you're not going to let me do this microsoft then let me turn off auto restart all together.
image caption: A Microsoft Windows screen showing "Active Hours" with start time set to 12 AM and end time set to 12 AM and an error that says "Choose an end time that's no more than 18 hours from the start time".
It’s just an opinion. I’m OK with having opinions that others disagree with. It makes the world a more interesting place, even if some of them might be wrong.
I make a lot of comments and had forgotten about this one already.
I would agree, but there's been at least two updates in the last six months that restarted my machine before I even got to see the pending restart warning. I use it every day and shutdown if I won't be. So the restart happened less than 24 hours after any warning if there even was a warning.
That has the potential to lose things I'm working on. Windows pathetic attempt to bring things back falls woefully short of functional.
Flash up alerts to say there's critical updates, but the action to actually restart should be a human interaction.
If CrowdStrike has taught us anything, it’s that blindly trusting automation can be equally (if not more) disastrous.
It’s one thing to ask me to update, but give me options; including to not update. There are machines out there in the world that still run Windows 95. They are vital to manufacturing processes, and cannot be updated because they run software that is no longer updated and there is no inexpensive alternative. It happens.
While that may not be the case in this circumstance, the point is that it’s up to the operator to determine when it’s time to update, not Microsoft.
Anecdotally, the only reason Microsoft does this is because people historically do not update their software regularly. Why? Because it’s burdensome and problematic. Whose fault is that? I’ll give you three guesses; the first two don’t count.
The point the other commenter is making, which I fully agree with, is that I can have legitimate reasons for not wanting to update. Windows shoving updates down my throat when they can potentially break critical stuff on my machine is pretty much just equivalent to forcing malware on me.
I don’t like auto updates. I make time to do routine updates of all my software on my time. I don’t need my computer suddenly shutting down on me, but most importantly, I don’t need major projects to get borked. Often times I finish anything I am working on or at least make quick backups before running an update.
There was a time when I would’ve believed this and there was actual transparency regarding what was in those updates. They can also break your system because you are the tester. They fired all their QA long ago.
I just don’t think they command the level of trust that they wanted, but on the other hand, that’s the reason I don’t use their OS in the first place so I may not be qualified..