Microsoft’s Automatic Update feature has always been annoying. I don’t care who you are, none of you can possibly say that it’s not annoying 
I thought that it wasn’t possible for it to become any more annoying than it already is, but today I was proved wrong.
My main gripe was that almost regardless of the update, the machine needs to be rebooted. You’ve updated my desktop picture? Reboot required. My IE install has had another check box added to the options? Reboot required. Notepad’s default font has changed? Reboot required.
Granted, some updates do need a reboot, and in those cases I’m ok with it. But every damned time??! For god’s take take a leaf out of the Linux book and stop forcing me to reboot unless I add new hardware. You’re given the option by an interfering message box to “Reboot Now” or “Reboot Later”. If you click “Reboot Later” becasue you’re in the middle of something, you’ll get that same damn message box appear again in 5 or so minutes time. My solution to this problem was to move this message box into the bottom right hand corner of the screen so that only a few pixels were visible. Clicking on the system tray forced it to paint over the top, and hence I’d be free of all evidence of an annoying popup except for it’s presence on the task bar.
So, that’s how it used to work. Now it’s even worse. Will everyone please give a big round of applause to the latest message box that greeted me after my last reboot after a batch of M$ patches…
Oh yeah, it’s now time limited! What a nifty feature. M$ are now forcing you to reboot to make sure that your system is up to date, regardless of whether or not you want to. Now you must click one of those two buttons for the message to disappear. If you click “Restart Later”, you’re back in the cycle of clicking it every 5 minutes.
Why don’t I just reboot? I’ll tell you why . . . because I’ve already reboot. Because I’m in the middle of something. Because I have a train of thought that I don’t want broken. Because I don’t want to have to wait for 2 mins for my system to restart, then another 4 mins for all the updates to be fully applied, then have another reboot, then wait all over again, only to then wait for the GPO to kick in and make sure that all my settings are up to date. We’re talking a possible 10 minute turnaround for a supposedly innocent reboot. While I’m working, that’s not the kind of time I want to have taken away. I want to click the “P*ss off and leave me alone” button. Alas, there isn’t one.
This new feature comes with a few added benefits. To benefit from them, picture yourself in any of the following scenarios:
- You wander away from your desk at lunch, and leave some of your work open/unsaved.
- You have an automated process running on another machine that you’re leaving alone for a few hours because you know it takes a long period of time.
- You have any kind of server with automatic updates turned on.
- You’re busy typing away, setting the keyboard on fire with the speed at which you type, and you see that message box appear and disappear really quickly . . . uh oh! . . . Which button did I ‘choose’?
M$, you really are a bunch of mindless muppets sometimes!
May 31, 2007
Why not just turn auto-update off?
(or at least set it to only download updates, not install them)
Let’s be honest, auto-update is designed for the kind of muppets that would never take updates if it was left up to them, leaving their machines vulnerable to being taken over. With that in mind, MS have to make it as inconvenient as possible for that class of user to NOT update.
And yes, it shouldn’t need to reboot to update, but we’re talking about an OS that was essentially designed before the internet made such regular updates necessary. If you’re only updating on the release of an SP then rebooting is not such a big deal.
May 31, 2007
Best not to assume that I’m talking about my home computer
Plus, even if I was, the issues discussed go far beyond just a single machine.
Bear in mind that lots of people work in places where GPO doesn’t allow auto-updates to be turned off (my current work has a few GPOs set up, and this is one of them).
Windows XP was not designed before the Internet, that argument doesn’t hold mate.
The point is, that whether you have the choice or not, they should not force constant reboots, and they shouldn’t have a program that times out and reboots your machine if it’s unattended. That’s just bad form.
May 31, 2007
XP is a largely cosmetic upgrade of WinNT, and for WinNT patching without rebooting wouldn’t have been a huge issue, as we weren’t patching our OS every week back then. As Vista is a much bigger rewrite, I would imagine it is far better at dealing with this than XP.
Personally, I’ll take the slight inconvenience of having to reboot, as the benefit we get from that is that Joe Sixpack’s PC forces him to update too, and there aren’t huge networks of zombied computers spamming me.
May 31, 2007
I know EXACTLY what you’re talking about. There are times when I will go WEEKS without rebooting my work PC. I don’t know what it is about rebooting, but it’s like I have to start all over again. It’s a 15-20 minute ordeal to get back to where I was. And when I’m coding, that kind of interruption drives me crazy. A 5 minute timer to reboot makes it more like a game show contest than an operating system. BEAT THE CLOCK!
May 31, 2007
Have you not also noticed that you can only select ‘Restart Later’ a certain number of times before it becomes disabled?
I didn’t until it was too late and had to quickly save everything before the timer finished. Was highly annoying seeing as I was trying to get something done urgently.
And i’m sure one of the new features of XP when it first launched was less of a need to reboot. But as things have progessed it’s been needing more and more reboots.
June 1, 2007
Iain: That’s still beside the point imho. You should reboot when YOU are ready, not when the computer says you’re ready. As a developer, I won’t total control, and sometimes rebooting right now just isn’t an option.
Matt: LOL. I hadn’t look at it that way! If I was at home, I might take it as a game :)… but while at work it is, and always will be, a total pain in the ass.
Gav: Nope, hadn’t noticed that
I guess I haven’t pressed the button often enough 
June 3, 2007
OJ - have you tried the suggestions listed here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000294.html
Here is an MS support article that covers other group policy settings in greater detail: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328010
When I have to use XP, I have mine set to install the updates only when I am about to actually restart the computer.
If you are a network admin, you can specify these group policy settings for all computers that connect to the network.
Cheers!
Kirupa =)
June 4, 2007
Hi Kirupa!
Thanks for the pointers mate. I have indeed sorted the issue out already, but I appreciate you sending the links! The whole process annoyed me that much I felt the need to scream about it
Thanks mate!
OJ
June 8, 2007
Vista seems to do nearly all its updates without needing a reboot (in fact I barely notice it doing it half the time as it just sits in the system tray quietly updating itself without bothering me).
Mac OS X has apparently done the same timed out restart since day one. Yet another thing MS have copied from them.
November 27, 2007
There is a way to turn it off or delay it for a long time eternity:
http://www.burnzpost.com/2007/10/20/squashing-the-restart-now-restart-later-pop-up-win-xp-pro/#comment-544
By the way is it possible to edit your blog because you made some annoying grammar errors, oh and I just noticed the first word isn’t even spelled right lol.
Weird how I missed that.
November 28, 2007
Thanks for the comment. The title of the post is changed, the rest will stay the same. I can edit it, but I won’t. It’s a personal blog, not a publication, and for a post like this which is just a bitch into the ether, I am not really that fussed on how much I’ve fucked up the grammar
Thank you anyway!