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Microsoft removes manual deferrals from Windows Update 'to prevent confusion'

• unixhero 6y ago
  How "helpful".
• raxxorrax 6y ago
  > Microsoft has been continually tweaking the way the Windows 10 updating process works based on "user feedback" I... what... where... when? Seriously, how about just giving control to users? And btw, I still see machines were the telemetry service eats CPU. If you cannot get it to work, remove it. It shouldn't be part of an OS anyway. Don't tell me users like it, you could just offer an app in that case. I don't get how neglected they have treated their flagship for desktop computers. Software as a service is good for my tax declaration, but I really hate this trend.
  • rkagerer 6y ago
    The rest of that quote concerning user feedback reads "...which seems to be, in large part, complaints."
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > Seriously, how about just giving control to users? Have you been living in a cave since 1999? Computing isn't about empowering people anymore, it's about extracting money and data (read: more money!) from them!
    • SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
      I'm going to try and be not cynical for a second - in 1999 computing truly empowered a small group of enthusiasts. Yes, lots of people had access to computers, but for many it was a word processor with slow internet, and a ton of vulnerabilities and viruses. Now many many more have been empowered, but at a cost of less peak power.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        I'd argue that they aren't really empowered. I don't feel empowered by my phone because everything is under someone else's control. I am only permitted to use applications as long as they don't want root access to the device. That trend is becoming more and more pervasive in other aspects of computing too.
        • SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
          I get that - we've lost control of the device, but we now have ubiquitous access to computing - reliable, (relatively) safe access to the internet everywhere for nearly everyone. That wasn't a thing 20 years ago - computers were more arcane and required expertise to maintain. I totally understand we've lost access to the devices, I'm just arguing that there's an other side to this whole thing.
          • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
            > I get that - we've lost control of the device, but we now have ubiquitous access to computing - reliable, (relatively) safe access to the internet everywhere for nearly everyone. Debatable. What makes computing so much more interesting than other tools is the ability to program them, to make the tool what you need it to be for what you want to do. 80s computer systems got this: they booted into a programming environment. 90s computer systems got this: they gave us HyperCard, VB, Delphi, etc and productivity software like Excel (which I contend is still the most widely used programming environment on earth) became programmable and extendable too. Turning first time computer users into programmers was a goal because that's what computers were for! We don't really have computers like that anymore. What we have are appliances. Sure, they have a lot of add-on modules, but you're not encouraged to program them, to adapt them to your needs, you're encouraged to buy that from somebody else with money and/or turning over data. A lot of those "tools" seek to addict you to their usage so you can be peppered with advertisements. You're consuming, not computing.
            • SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    • anoncake 6y ago
      Everything capitalist is.
  • dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
    > Software as a service is good for my tax declaration Could you elaborate on that? When buying a permanent license you should be able to deduct the full sum as a cost of doing business, it shouldn't matter if it's Saas or not.
    • selectodude 6y ago
      You have to depreciate permanent licenses as if they're any other durable good. With SAAS you can just write the whole thing off as a service. They get you to the same place, but SAAS does it with significantly less fuss.
      • neltnerb 6y ago
        Wait, isn't it inexpensive enough that you can deduct it all in the first year? It's been that way for a while I thought.
      • gruez 6y ago
        >With SAAS you can just write the whole thing off as a service. They get you to the same place, but SAAS does it with significantly less fuss. Isn't this made up for by SaaS being cheaper (at least initially) than permanent licenses? eg. office 365 personal (SaaS) is $70/year, but office 2019 (perpetual) is $250 one time. I'm not sure what the "fuss" is.
  • sp332 6y ago
    Windows machines get forcibly updated because users kept letting their boxes be part of botnets which hurt other users.
    • ballenf 6y ago
      One day we'll reminisce about the time when it wasn't illegal to let your machine be on the internet without a mask.
      • ta17711771 6y ago
        And we were allowed to steer the car.
        • sp332 6y ago
          While criminal botherders are in a sense "more" responsible for the damage, Microsoft also has some liability in their negligence when then wrote vulnerable software. But it's relatively easy to hold MS accountable for their part than to extract damages from botherders. So MS either covers their butts by locking down the software or pays out the nose for damages.
        • google234123 6y ago
          If we have to give that up to save 1.35 million people's lives a year in car crashes then it's worth it.
          • rbecker 6y ago
            Accepting such a giant restriction ('not allowed' implies no override) would mean you are at the mercy of whoever controls the self-driving cars. They can kidnap you any time you enter a car, or prevent you from using your car to escape, or just subtly make your life very difficult. Historically, people that allowed themselves to completely fall into someone else's hands have not fared well. The words 'slavery' and 'genocide' tend to come up when describing their fate.
          • 6y ago
  • derefr 6y ago
    > Seriously, how about just giving control to users? "Users" as you likely remember them—"power users by necessity", people who willingly learned the arcana of computing just to use the thing—don't exist any more. They died out in the 90s, when computers stopped booting to BASIC and dialing into BBSes. You know how it feels to use a centrally-managed corporate workstation? That's how people now expect all computers to work. They're using it; but "someone else" is the sysadmin. They don't have admin privileges; "the IT department" does, or "their phone carrier" does, or "Google" does (in the case of something like a Chromebook.) Corporations can still be the sysadmin for their own enterprise rollouts of Windows (and if you're a real "power user", I'd suggest going the route of pretending you're a corporate IT department managing a one-machine deployment—Windows is a lot more "submissive" in that state); but now Microsoft themselves are the sysadmin-of-last-resort. But don't think for a moment that before this, most users were their own sysadmin-of-last-resort. Again, that died out in the 90s, when computers stopped being "business machines" that hobbyists could do some pro-am work with (in the same sense that one might build a machine-shop in their garage); and began instead being marketed to anyone and everyone. Before Microsoft assumed the role, the sysadmin-of-last-resort for most post-Eternal-September users was either "my nephew who knows computers"; or it was "nobody"—until things got really bad, at which point they'd bring the computer into a repair shop and a random repair-tech would be the sysadmin. (It's like having no family doctor, only a free clinic you visit in emergencies!) As one of those former "nephews who knows computers", let me tell you that I'd much rather Microsoft have the job than I. > Don't tell me users like it, you could just offer an app in that case. People like the idea of donating organs, but that doesn't mean they'll ever seek out a consent form to opt into the organ-donor program. But in countries where it's opt-out, they don't bother to seek out the de-consent form, either. It's just such a far-away concern to most people, that there's too much inertia for people to change the default no matter what it is. (And if someone comes up to them and asks, they'll default to whichever option is less trouble—i.e. continuing be either opted-in or opted-out, depending—even if it's not the option that they'd prefer. They just don't want this time stolen from their day, for something they care so little about; and since changing things can often have unexpected not-mentioned-up-front labor-costs, they put negative expected-value on switching, even if they put positive value on the switched end-state.)
    • 6y ago
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • naikrovek 6y ago
    > how about just giving control to users? Because most users don't know WTF they're doing, especially the ones that think they do because they ran their own domain 20 years ago.
• Multicomp 6y ago
  Too many users were using options to hit the 'defer updates for 365 days' button. Microsoft can't let them do that ("...Star Fox!"), they NEED the newest features, security updates, and telemetry. Cynical: The stupid users don't know what's good for em, that's for MS to decide now, not the users. However, there is an opt out via GPO for now. Of course if that gets used enough it will be ignored. "If you wish to continue leveraging deferrals, you can use local Group Policy (Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Windows Update > Windows Update for Business > Select when Preview builds and Feature Updates are received or Select when Quality Updates are received)."
  • rkagerer 6y ago
    They ought to consider why users don't want (and are actively circumventing) the updates.
    • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      I may be a cynical, and lets face it angry, old man, but I am quite confident they do know why and just don't care because their priorities do not lie with making the user experience good.
      • 3pt14159 6y ago
        Counterpoint: A critical security bug in Windows led to the power grid going down due to a worm. Maybe security updates shouldn't be dismissible for weeks and weeks?
        • dx87 6y ago
          I think that's a failure in the organization that didn't have a security update policy, not a failure in Windows.
        • cybwraith 6y ago
          In a corporate network full of critical systems, absolutely! On a home PC used to check email or play games... no way should updates be forced upon an end user who specifically opts out. Note this update applies to Win10 "Pro" versions, not just enterprise or volume licensing, so developers who need to test/support older versions will also have problems.
• seneca 6y ago
  I genuinely don't understand why people buy the "New Microsoft" marketing line. They are adopting Linux because they have no other option. Where they're strong, the desktop, they're still the same old Microsoft.
  • wayneftw 6y ago
    It turns out that there are multiple groups of people at Microsoft and these factions aren’t all in agreement all the time. I’m sure that there are plenty of those at Microsoft that disagree with telemetry and updates that you can’t opt out of. I would bet that many of them are in the developer division.
    • mikro2nd 6y ago
      It doesn't matter that there are multiple groups with differing opinions at MS or at any other organisation. The organisation acts as a organism (or, if you prefer, as a set of emergent behaviours). It is, for all practical purposes, a single entity. So ascribing a behaviour or a wish or a bias to "Microsoft" is an entirely valid generalisation. Generalisations are only bad when applied to isolated/differentiated components/constituents of a compound body.
      • wayneftw 6y ago
        Oh okay, well that explains everything. So which other group on the same order of magnitude of Microsoft's 150,000 employees do you know of that exhibits the same kind of decisiveness that would normally be attributed to a single entity?
        • wizzwizz4 6y ago
          Facebook is the first that comes to mind, followed by Twitter (the "other social media company" in my mind, even though Reddit's bigger).
          • wayneftw 6y ago
• whyoh 6y ago
  I'm trying to see the benevolent aspect of these major updates that happen every 6 months, but I don't see it. Do they have to be so frequent? Do they have to be so massive (several GB downloads)? And yet, 5 years after RTM, Windows 10 still has two control panels and an overall inconsistent UI and plenty of bugs. The whole OS is like a permanent work in progress.
  • jsnell 6y ago
    They definitely need to be that frequent, because the less often your upgrade the more risky and painful it is. It feels like most the OS X releases are despised as buggy and breaking everything, since they try to do too much in a year. And then you have the occasional release that stabilizes things and mollifies the users. ChromeOS releases every couple of months. The changes are so incremental that it's hard to notice they even happen. And if there are breakages, they're hard to notice since it's just a couple of things rather than everything. Also, they can be fixed or rolled back quickly, since there isn't a year of other feature work built on top of whatever caused the breakage. Even six months is a little on the risky side. You'd never release a web app with that many changes piled up. Why would operating systems be different? Can't comment on the size being necessary, but at least it doesn't sound unreasonable. A Fedora upgrade is usually a couple of GB, iirc, and happens twice a year.
    • zozbot234 6y ago
      Releasing too often is just churn for the sake of churn. Debian issues one stable release every two years, and it takes many months to get a release into shape after the freeze on major (system-wide) updates.
      • snazz 6y ago
        Debian is not Windows. Debian is a well-tested collection of frozen-in-time packages that receive backported security fixes (an approach that does not scale to applications the size of Chromium and Firefox). Debian doesn't have to do any marketing; stability on servers is of the utmost importance. Windows, on the other hand, "needs" to have new features annually or biannually for marketing purposes. Same with macOS and iOS. Windows is an integrated system, not a collection of packages. While I agree that constant releases are annoying, I do understand why modern software is released frequently. Companies that make money off of ad engagement (like social networks) do A/B testing to make money. This usually requires frequent updates.
• charlesdaniels 6y ago
  As an outsider (someone who doesn't use any MS products) looking in... why would anyone build a production system around this platform? Why would anyone use this platform? Windows 10 has, since it's inception, been a privacy nightmare, which simply does not respect the user or administrator. There might be some hacks to let you turn some of these behaviors off, but it seems like they aren't likely to survive an OS update. I just cannot imagine owning a business and being OK with some other company having control over whether or not I am permitted to use my computer systems to get work done today.
  • jodrellblank 6y ago
    > why would anyone build a production system around this platform? Why would anyone use this platform? Long term stable backwards compatible, cross compatible with other popular tools other people are using, familiar to a large pool of employees, supported by large numbers of third party software and hardware vendors. It’s cheap. > I just cannot imagine owning a business and being OK with some other company having control over whether or not I am permitted to use my computer systems to get work done today. Not buying any electricity from the grid today? Or any internet or cloud services, or any rented office space? or just ignoring the group policy options and the months of time you could choose to update, ignoring the “update at times I’m not using it” options, ignoring the bandwidth metering options, not restricting its internet connectivity, and on the last possible day instructing all your employees to hit the “defer updates” button by hand and ... by gosh it’s gone!
    • charlesdaniels 6y ago
      > It’s cheap. Until you cannot use your system at a critical time because MS decided you needed an update. Then the cost may be anything between what you paid, and the total value of your entire business. > Not buying any electricity from the grid today? Or any internet or cloud services, or any rented office space? There are regulations to protect people from arbitrarily loosing access to those things, and to provide them a means to dispute bogus eviction / cut-off notices. You cannot simply walk into a space you have leased and tell everyone to pack up and leave that moment. Except for the cloud services bit, but I contend that many businesses could avoid the use of cloud services if they so choose. > or just ignoring the group policy options and the months of time you could choose to update If I paid for it, it should be my prerogative to never update if I so choose. The fact that you can use an obscure GPO that may or may not work on this weeks minor revision doesn't sound very compelling. > ignoring the “update at times I’m not using it” options I have read many reports of Windows and it's users disagreeing what constitutes "using it". > ignoring the bandwidth metering options If I am not on a metered connection, I should not have to use settings relating to that to manage when my computer updates.
• rocky1138 6y ago
  If it didn't require a reboot, an automatic update wouldn't bother me at all. I hate that my one remaining Windows machine is never in the same state I left it because it rebooted during the night.
  • dhimes 6y ago
    I lean towards this too. Microsoft and iTunes can't seem to get package management right. Maybe now that they've dabbled in Linux they'll update their process.
    • m0xte 6y ago
      iTunes is dead on Mac. Assuming it will go away on windows soon.
      • dhimes 6y ago
        What do people use?
        • m0xte 6y ago
          Apple Music, tv and podcasts apps.
          • dhimes 6y ago
            Boo.
  • rubatuga 6y ago
    You can disable automatic reboots.
    • blibble 6y ago
      next year: > Microsoft has been continually tweaking the way the Windows 10 update reboot process works based on "user feedback"
• m0xte 6y ago
  I’m done and out. One too many turd to deal with.
• henearkr 6y ago
  And of course it's still possible to opt-out with some "pro" version? I mean, there are always situations where you want to avoid to be interrupted by updates by all mean... Oh wait, I get it... pro versions are called Arch, Gentoo, etc... ;)
  • ashleyn 6y ago
    As usual, they will be moved up to Enterprise, with no ability for the consumer to purchase Enterprise.
    • Spivak 6y ago
      Purchasing Enterprise is definitely super annoying but it's not out of reach for an individual. You can only purchase Enterprise through Volume Licensing and you have to find/choose a reseller (VAR in msspeak). But you buy one license of Windows 10 Enterprise and 4 cheap user CALs and you're done. You don't actually have to have a business or anything. Any reseller will just put your own name as the business name. (If your machine didn't come with pro then make that 1 Pro license, 1 Enterprise license, and 3 user CALs.)
      • henearkr 6y ago
        So probably the best next step for MS is to prepare something like a "dev" license, i.e. an Enterprise license for the individual that knows what he is doing.
• kens 6y ago
  I'm a tolerant person, but I switched from Windows to Mac because the forced Windows updates kept messing me up. One time I left a long simulation running overnight. In the morning, I was greeted by a computer that had automatically rebooted to install updates, killing my simulation. Another instance was my daughter's birthday party, where she wanted to show a movie. The computer decided to spend an hour doing updates instead. It seems like Windows has become an update engine that will sometimes also do computation for you. My assumption is there's someone at Microsoft who gets a bonus as long as they keep presenting update graphs going up and to the right, and they don't care how much they mess up the user experience in the process. Microsoft should reassign that person.
  • Spooky23 6y ago
    Its part of the windows as a service transition. In a commercial setting it’s even worse — I have had to keep machines vulnerable because update bundles contain code that breaks stuff and you cannot break them out. The other fun thing is that if you run into a complex problem, there’s no scenario where it will get fixed for you. For some products, there is literally a two week window before they freeze changes. There is no escape — this is the new way. Apple is even worse and more unpredictable.
    • userbinator 6y ago
      I have had to keep machines vulnerable because update bundles contain code that breaks stuff and you cannot break them out. Vulnerable to what, exactly? That is also the other part of the problem with these "security updates" --- if you look at the details (when they are provided, which seems to be diminishing too) the vast majority of them are local privilege escalations that assume the attacker can run arbitrary code on the machine; IMHO if an attacker can do that, you already have a much bigger problem to worry about!
  • geoelectric 6y ago
    Mac isn't all that much better with the Remind Me Later nag you can't fully dismiss. They've been marching steadily towards forced updates, just they're being obnoxious enough first that people will thank them for cutting the UI noise.
• LorenPechtel 6y ago
  Want us to be more tolerant of updates? Set things up with much better support for shutting programs down cleanly and ideally restarting them as they were. Add a Windows message that says "shut down for restart" and don't do a forced restart until every program has honored it. (Obviously, older programs won't support it.)
  • freeone3000 6y ago
    That's actually very close to what happens in Windows 10 2004. UWP apps, store apps, and any app updated reasonably recently (so, ime, Chrome) will absolutely reboot and resume state after a machine restart. Try it out, it's cool. Shutdown is currently two-phase, and has been since 7. Programs receive a shutdown notification, and then can handle it, and the machine doesn't shut down until all are handled... or until 2 minutes pass, because occasionally programs misbehave, and one program shouldn't be able to hold up the entire shutdown process.
    • Dylan16807 6y ago
      The request isn't for it to be two phase, it's for auto-shutdown to cancel if any program can't fully restore itself. If there's going to be a forced shutdown, to make sure everyone updates, it should come after half a week to a week of having a big warning on the screen. Windows should never be forcing programs closed when the user is on a coffee break or gone for the day or asleep. Also chrome will reopen pages, but if you were doing something on that page it's going to be gone. So unless they improve that, it's not a great candidate for auto-reboot.
      • freeone3000 6y ago
        For Chrome, that's going to be a fix on Chrome's side - you can't simply suspend/unsuspend like with hibernate because libraries are going to be changing, so it's up to each program to figure out how to restore. UWP handles it for you but, well. As for waiting for ALL programs to be ready: No. Not going to happen. There are programs written in 1996 still running on Windows PCs today that don't comprehend the event model, nevermind listening to the shutdown event to save state. And they will forever run. And the system is going to have to reboot at some point. The alerts were tried. People didn't like being told their computer was going to restart, so the alerts went away.
• voldacar 6y ago
  Would it be difficult to just patch the binary that controls updating to just go back to the previous behavior?
  • TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Code signing may make this difficult.
• driverdan 6y ago
  If you must run Windows 10 I strongly recommend the Enterprise LTSB (Long-Term Servicing Branch) version. You have much more control and can strip out most of the garbage. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to get a single copy of Enterprise LTSB. Hint: windows 10 enterprise ltsb gen2
  • blibble 6y ago
    you probably want ltsc, which is a newer branch completely unrelated: ebay is great, isn't it?
• herpderperator 6y ago
  Before Windows 10 I would just disable the Windows Update service and enable it on my own schedule when I wanted to do updates. I've had my machines stay undisruptive for months on end, sometimes up to a year without rebooting, and the reboots would be initiated by me (hardware changes, power outages, or updates that I actually wanted to install.) Since Windows 10, Microsoft has caught onto this and added a new service that checks if you disabled the Windows Update service and re-enables it automatically, and sets permissions that initially deny you from tampering with it that then makes this a little more challenging to get around, but still possible to do manually. I later found Windows Update Blocker (WUB) which does all of this for you in one click. I have been using it ever since, and have never again been nagged by any update or experienced an unexpected reboot: https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-5/ https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-update-blocker-v1-5/
  • fsflover 6y ago
    This sounds like fighting with your own computer. No thanks, I go to GNU/Linux.
    • wvenable 6y ago
      Running GNU/Linux involves a different kind of fighting with your computer for a lot of machines. The intent is different but the result is the same.
      • ubercow13 6y ago
        Depending on the user, the psychological result can be quite different. I mean it doesn't really matter if Windows reboots and kills your computation overnight, you can just do it again! On average over time, it probably doesn't waste your time any more than making Linux work would. But it feels rude.
        • bragh 6y ago
          On average over time, I feel that Linux definitely loses out on desktop. But it's not about rudeness, but about the choice of when you want to use the administration time. If you have a strict deadline or presentation coming up, then that 1 hour for updates or a forced restart can be much more costly than when the update happens during the weekend or while watching a movie.
• alibert 6y ago
  Please note that the feature to defer still exists and can be found in Group Policy.
• wheybags 6y ago
  I finally got pissed off enough at the forced update policy that I made a tool to disable updates for real: https://github.com/wheybags/win10bsfixer https://github.com/wheybags/win10bsfixer It works by killing and disabling the windows update service every 10 seconds, so it should be resilient to pretty much any aggressive changes ms makes. It does allow manually updating when you want to too. I want to have it handle some other nasty behaviours too eventually, but its enough for me to use for now.
  • post_break 6y ago
    It’s so sad that is has come to this. It’s one of the reasons I’m a Mac user for the most part. Although since Mojave they have gotten more and more annoying with updates. My biggest issue is windows server. I’m worried if I disable updates it will break it.
  • kasabali 6y ago
    Possible next step for Microsoft: making Windows update service unkillable like defender service
    • userbinator 6y ago
      It's not "unkillable" as long as I can still modify arbitrary blocks of the hard drive... even if it means doing so from another OS ;-) But you're right, they seem to be escalating the fight.
  • canada_dry 6y ago
    +1 for the effort. I'm wondering though isn't there a list of MS update ips floating around that you can add to your router's black-list?
    • wheybags 6y ago
      I thought about that, but it would require maintenance. This can be a mostly fire-and-forget method, which is especially valuable to me because windows is not my primary OS.
• ausjke 6y ago
  A happy Ubuntu users here for the last 15 years, I guess I don't really understand what Microsoft is messing around anymore and I'm just glad that I do not need Microsoft at all for so long.
• panpanna 6y ago
  What pisses me off is that a windows machinea spend so much time downloading and installing the OS and just a few Microsoft apps. Linux machines update everything including hundreds of apps you may have installed (and some are updated very often) and you barely notice it happening because it's so damn efficient.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• jimnotgym 6y ago
  There are a lot of comments on this thread which ignore one important point. Windows updates are totally centrally controllable to an enterprise user. They can be made silent, and force rebooting can be incredibly rare. On the other hand I get lots of calls about mac problems which are caused by not updating! That is not really the Unix stability that people argue for, is it? We answer Mac calls with a 'have you tried updating, then turn it off and on again'
  • mrgordon 6y ago
    I'd love to hear about the long list of issues that require updating on Mac. I have many old Macs and I've never seen an issue that require updating other than new software (especially from the App Store) requiring a newer OS or the inconvenience that Safari updates are tied to OS updates. The idea that Mac is unstable and requires a lot of updates and reboots to just function is news to me...
    • jimnotgym 6y ago
      'I can't send emails' 'I have not received any emails today' 'I can't save a file I have been working on all day' These are so common from my Apple using user segment that they are running jokes in our IT team. I have a feeling abou tthe root cause (below)...but they are exacerbated by the user base beleiveing some myth that Mac's somehow do not need updating and rebooting. And before anyone asks, I have actually heard the words 'I don't need to reboot I'm on a Mac.' come out of a users mouth. I have been watching our remote management tools and Windows users seem to see shutting down at the end of the day as normal behaviour, whereas my Mac users tend to restart when they have to. (before anyone says anything, my experiments have shown that left on for days on end both Windows and Mac show performance degradation, ususally from the classic memory hogs of Excel, Adobe CC and Chrome.) I think the answer to why so many systems are troubled by updates is that your average Mac or PC does not exist in isolation, and are really semi-dumb terminals for a bunch of cloud services from Adobe, Google, and Microsoft. The clients need to stay up-to-date with the service. The typical, 'Linux user running a simulation over multiple days' that are posting about not having to update below are existing in isolation form those other services.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
  Makes sense. I clicked it accidentally out of habit because it looked like an optional download button for an update.
• amyjess 6y ago
  This is just going to cause technically-inclined people to configure their networks to MITM all calls to the Windows update servers and block updates network-wide.
• twirlock 6y ago
  It does prevent confusion! It prevents confusion about who Microsoft thinks owns my computer once I install their OS.
• corty 6y ago
  Microsoft is reducing confusion. They don't want you confused into thinking it's your software or your computer...
• pndy 6y ago
  All these never ending stories with Windows Update in W10 is like walking around the problem that is caused by lack of proper QA team that was pushed onto users and removal of previously perfectly working feature of selective updates installing - which was obviously great because in case of problems user could just skip the bugged patch and wait till a fixed version is released. The old way of delivering patches in Vista/7 style should return - even by a price of patches "weight". I get it: they want people to stay up-to-date to avoid problems of zombie-machines but Windows isn't OSX that works on narrow set of hardware and software configurations - these differ much (duh) and that affects how updates work. Expecting that users will ditch their workflow to report all issues on forums (or these will come from the "enthusiasts" testing grounds), will want to play countless reinstallations, backups and restoring is just wrong. This leads powerusers who want to have more control over their machines to disable (temporarily or permanently) WU along with associated processes which by the way, seem behave in a very malicious way.
  • rstuart4133 6y ago
    Windows updates have another feature: you wake up in the morning, and UI has changed, the feature set has been updated, things can no longer work. This happens on Android as well. Infuriatingly Google Maps decided to update itself during the day, between two car trips. I'm driving on a freeway, realise I don't know where I'm going, and fire up maps to tell it the address and am confronted with a new UI that is going to take some real concentration to decipher, the sort of concentration that can not be given while driving down a freeway. I yelled a few things at the maps developers that day. Compare that to Debian. Updates are backports of bug fixes to the existing source code base. It is the absolute smallest change possible to fix the defect. There are literally 10 of thousands of updated to Debian packages over the life time of a single release, and yet you noticing any change over it's entire lifetime is very unlikely. [0] Calling Debian Stable "stable" is an understatement. It's a rock. Bedrock even. On Debian big changes on happen when you move between versions. Versions are currently supported for 6 years. The timing of moving to a new version is at the compete digression of the user. [0] That's a bit of a lie. Web browsers in particular are so big and complex the manual work of backporting fixes has overwhelmed the Debian Developers. For those packages only, they stick with the closest upstream provides, which is the ESR version for Firefox. But they only last a year or so, which forces Debian to move to a new version occasionally.
• naikrovek 6y ago
  To all of you shouting complaints into the ether in the hope of gaining karma: this change only affects Windows 10 Enterprise.
• pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
  I am honstely surprised that businesses and other organisations have come to accept this constant 24/7 "updates" scenario from Microsoft without some intelligent business people calling them out on it. Imagine if every month, every week, or even every day someone from an office supply company came around to your office and collected all your pens, pencils and other office supplies and replaced them with "updated" versions. Meanwhile you could detect no meaningful difference from the "old" ones. After a while, you would just tell them to go away: "The supplies I have are working just fine. Thanks."
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• jeisc 6y ago
  WINOS >> a work in progress since the 1980's WINDEVS >> don't touch what is working unless your boss told you to do so. WINUSERS >> don't update unless your boss tells you to do so if you have no boss don't update. REALITY >> you need two computers which can do the same work if one goes down.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]