3 ms·

Particularly with Windows 10 (maybe 8?), Windows will try to guess when your (desktop/laptop) computer is unused based on knowledge of when you've been actively

Particularly with Windows 10 (maybe 8?), Windows will try to guess when your (desktop/laptop) computer is unused based on knowledge of when you've been actively using it, and default to that as an update install time. But more generally, it's a balancing act - for everyone who is running in an environment where they have everything locked out and they just want an application to keep running, there's also plenty of people who leave their machines running public services connected to the Internet with no firewall, antivirus, or anything of that nature, and refuse to install updates because it interrupts the service. I think Microsoft decided they'd rather be shit on by consumers for forcing automatic updates than be shit on by everyone for a poor security record ever again.

Piskvorrr 10y ago
Which sounds all reasonable; great even. But then MS adds the secret ingredient, which completely breaks it: mandatory autorestart that can't be switched off without also breaking the autoupdate (or at least, I have yet to see a way to do that in WinX). "Oh hey, while you were out to a meeting/lunch/sleep, we decided that nothing you had open was of any value, and threw it away. Shouldn't have been using that software if it didn't provide autobackups, eh?" (Even with software that does have automatic backups to guard against unreliable machines (sic!), it's an emergency measure, not something I should want to use)