For anyone who wants to do this, use Kill Windows Update. It’s simple. and it works. There’s several million reasons why conventional wisdom demands that you NOT do it, but I don’t give a fuck and if you don’t either, then this program is for you.
Gotta give this one a try!
You really shouldn’t
I don’t keep nuclear secrets on my PC, but sometimes I run tasks that take days to process, and Windows updates have fucked me more than once.
Updates patch major security vulnerabilities. It’s cute that you think nuclear secrets existing in your hard drive are the only reason why you should care if your PC is infected with malware but it isn’t. Malware can steal your keystrokes, granting attackers access to your bank accounts and every other place you sign into online. Malware also uses background processes to do bad things, so your “multi-day” processes will take even longer when your computers resources are being hogged by nasty stuff.
A machine sitting there quietly crunching numbers isn’t going to get infected unless your firewall is wide open, and if it is then correcting that is far more important than installing the latest Windows updates
And they can use your PC for DDoS attack on other people, so it’s not like it’s just your problem if your pc gets infected by everything ever.
Why?
I never shut down or restart my computer. Then some mornings I find that Windows decided to automatically restart my computer anyway. I lost a lot of unsaved notes that way.
That’s a you problem. Don’t blame windows for shitty practices.
Ackshually you still can blame Windows for not supporting live updates.
It wasnt an issue until windows 10 though. It feels like computers are a bit worse now, imo. For some reason, it’s now popular opinion that it’s unsafe to run a computer as long as you like. It’s one of the main reasons I’ll move to Linux… some day
… why exactly are you leaving unsaved work open on your PC and expecting it to be there the next day? And it seems it’s intentional? Think of all the things that could lose the work apart from an update. A power outage, a brownout, a failed PC component; memory corruption, and more.
It’s was just notes, not work work (that’s all in the cloud). And yes,I expect things to be there the next day, it’s been decades since I was working on a 2x86 with a bad hard drive that froze ar random intervals, so I had to save every few seconds. I do save even my random notes now, just in case, but if they get closes I will probably forget about them because the whole point is to have them on screen as reminders.
It’s weird how being forced to restart your computer by the OS is obviously a new feature yet people defend it so religiously.
I don’t understand why people care so much? It’s like people that don’t want to keep their PCs running always feel better about themselves for using their PC the way the OS forces them to?
I miss the days of if you don’t have something nice to say just stfu. Now, it’s if you don’t say anything to put them down, how will you feel better about yourself?
Eh… This was more of a comment on “why aren’t you saving your work” which has been a push point since the dawn of computers.
That said, forced updates and restarts aren’t a bad thing. They should be defended to an extent. You don’t remember the days of virtually every consumer PC being months behind on security updates? Viruses running rampant?
The feature can be bypassed by the users who actually care. Yes, with “a lot of” work to intentionally prevent non-power users from just flipping the bit and going back to a world of un-updated boxes of vulnerability.
Idk, I think it’s worse and I care very little about the people you’re describing. There’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to turn off the ability for Microsoft to turn off your computer whenever they like.
I never had an issue leaving my PC running or in sleep mode for weeks - I used to pause a game, put it in sleep and then resume it on wake, no problem. Now it’s basically impossible to control when it turns off. That said, I’ll admit I recently realized I actually had enterprise windows instead of pro so maybe that was why I was never able to get it working despite hours of trying.
Does iOS force updates? How do they do it? Surely the average Mac user understands less about updates and whatnot. I mean, if they had ever (obviously they never will) just let people install iOS on their own hardware I’d have left Windows a very long time ago. I plan on moving to Linux one day though I’ve realized that’s going to be a monumental task on its own.
I’ve got my own issues and all but windows absolutely infuriates me nowadays. I wish nothing but the worst for it. I kind of want them to do what reddit did and force me to leave
The people aren’t the only reason, apart from their direct damages. There’s also the fact that rampant viruses literally drain the community they are in, and are a harm to the online community as well.
Few of the people we are talking about understand computers, meaning they need to have someone else deal with it, or continue to be compromised. Banking info being stolen means more work for the fraud department of the bank, and the police, potentially even the FBI if the issue is large enough.
And rampant viruses mean larger botnets, more computation being leeched causing more electricity usage. More online disruptions of services, and more general spam from compromised accounts trying to spread the infection.
As for iOS, yes and no, and a clarification point. Yes, it attempts to force updates through deceptive means to get the users consent to install at some random point “tonight” which cannot be scheduled. You can turn this off, though there are many reports of this being reversed for some unknown reason. They’ve also moved to force installing security patches without consent, even if you disable the auto update.
The clarification point, is that iPhones are some of the most locked down devices out there. Even if you manage to get an infection, the majority of the time it’s only able to work within the normal sandbox. On top of that, iOS is one of the “most updated” OSs out there. Apart from the users trying to preserve versions for jailbreaking and related tools, or devices enrolled in certain enterprise situations, you’d be hard pressed to find someone on an old version even a week after a new release.
I’m sorry that you’ve lost so much work. Although it’s kind of irresponsible to leave unsaved work open overnight. Perhaps you could look into applications that have an autosave feature? Alternativly if your workflow permits it do your work on the cloud?
I do my actual work in the cloud. But when I want to just jut down quick notes I open a Notepad window and write them there. Usually it’s something I need to remember for just a few hours later. Sometimes it’s something I’ll be expanding on somewhere permanent later on. It’s just the most handy place to write something down quickly. Sometimes I have one such window open, sometimes I end up with 6. I just so happened that night I had some more important notes that I didn’t transfer yet. I’ve got into the habit of saving them now just in case, so I have tons of small text files that I’ll probably forget about.
At this point I just accept that my windows desktop is going to reboot itself and update itself every fucking night. I used to be able to leave it on for months at a time only rebooting when I felt like it and had prepared all of my open projects to be rebooted.
Now I do those projects on my Linux PC, which has to be a separate PC now because the windows updates completely screw up dual booting. Microsoft is such a shit show, I would probably only turn on that PC on the weekends except I need Windows for work.
Put a second hard drive In your PC and install Linux solely to it. Then you can use your BIOS boot menu to choose which OS to boot and Windows can’t wreck GRUB when updating.
I thought that too. My (now windows only) computer has two M2 slots, I used one for Linux and one for Windows. One day I walked into my office having left windows running the night before and my computer had rebooted and updated, The first thing I did was try to boot into the Linux partition and it did not work.
Not taking that chance again, I now have two separate PCs on my desk.
Hmm. That’s interesting. The only thing I can think of that could potentially cause that is if for whatever reason there was an exisitng EFI partition on your linux drive. Windows will use whatever EFI it sees even if it’s on a separate drive from it’s primary NTFS partition. As you can imagine this can cause some fucky stuff to happen.
Some instructions I’ve read for dual booting recommend installing Linux first, removing the SSD wit Linux on it from the computer, and then install Windows to prevent that from happening.
It’s really shitty that users have to go through all that trouble, though.
I’m in two minds about this. On the one hand, philosophically, the user should be in charge of their PC, and updates should happen at a time of their choosing.
On the other hand, people are idiots. Especially the type of people who think they know everything but in reality don’t. The type that will search for registry hacks or scripts that disable updates, and proceed to live without any security patches, putting not only their own system/data at risk, but others too.
It’s probably a necessary evil that MS forces security patches on users.
What isn’t so forgivable is them pushing all the other crap on people, or why the updates take so fucking long on shutdown/startup. That’s what they need to improve. Far fewer people would care about avoiding updates if a reboot after an update was imperceptibly different to any normal startup, like it is on Linux.
MS is a $3tn company. They can achieve this if they want to, but they see spending money on Windows as a waste of money - why improve something when you’ve already cornered the market? It doesn’t benefit them. It doesn’t make them more money. Windows is dominant either way, they get their licensing fees either way. Improving Windows damages Microsoft.
Linux superiority.
I have an extra wireless keyboard laying around just because it has a quick shutdown button on it.
I just don’t think the sex will have been very good.
Try configuring windows update
People who shutdown their desktop computer everytime they’re done using it are so bizarre to me. Why? What are you trying to protect? I only reboot when updates are needed and otherwise my computer is on 24/7. Been doing this since ~2004 and have never had an issue.
Edit: I’m not saying you’re wrong if you shutdown everytime. I’m just saying it’s weird to me because it hasn’t been necessary since the mid 2000’s or probably earlier.
Do you also keep your car running all day for when you have to be somewhere and only turn off the engine at the gas station?
That seems like a bad faith argument, but I’ll indulge. Gasoline internal combustion engine aren’t made to run indefinitely and have many components that can wear over time and require regular maintenance. Modern computer hardware has no problem with the task and my “newest” computer which was built back in 2016 has run pretty much non-stop for 8 years now with 0 failure. At this point the hardware is more likely to be replaced due to age than failure. The only argument I can see making sense is maybe the cost of electricity aspect; but even then modern power supplies are so efficient I’d be surprised if it costs me more than $10/yr. to leave my PC on so I don’t it’s a very strong argument.
