I definitely agree that there should be options to turn the silent updates off... There are several companies I disable: Winamp, for a while, was updating WAY

I definitely agree that there should be options to turn the silent updates off... There are several companies I disable: Winamp, for a while, was updating WAY too often; I used to have trouble with Quicktime - but, in my humble opinion, that software is just... ugh. bloatware and badly written. Thank goodness we've moved on from it as a standard... Adobe's updater is another one I turn off - I really dislike the companies that add a "quickstart" app to my startup - I don't need update checkers from ten different companies stealing my resources.... But there are some smaller names that I do think get it right: Filezilla - even though they tend to update more than I'd like, the update process works pretty well and doesn't take too long; uTorrent is another, as well as VLC does okay... I definitely think that different classes of users will have different experiences. For Gramma and Grampa, autoupdating is generally better, because they never will. For us geeks: well, we can turn it off for companies that don't do it right; and we talk about our experiences - companies develop reputations...