Sure, there's usually a setting to disable it, and a popup to delay it, but it's not really enough. The setting appears unreliable at best, and the popup is useless when it pops under fullscreen programs.
It really only takes one ill-timed restart to damn an OS forever, especially when the restart is chased by lengthy (and impossible to decline) downtime while a patch or upgrade is installed. Restarting on someone during a Skype interview or business call is shockingly unacceptable, no matter how sensible the average case.
It also has no clue what a server is. Servers with Windows 2012 R2, force the users to reboot. How stupid are microsoft, that they assume that people will be ok with rebooting production servers in the middle of the day.
This! Anyone saying this is new behavior caused by the Windows 10 update has never been booted out of a WoW raid at 3 am because the restart pop-up didn't show beneath the game window. Windows Update has been doing this since XP.
In this case it's Windows 7's Restart logic that is old/bad (and long has been), not Windows 10, but Windows 10 of course is getting blamed for it, not Windows 7.
It's another reason people should stop worrying and upgrade to Windows 10. ;)
I don’t particularly enjoy waking up to all my programs are closed because Windows decided that tonight was the night that it restarted.
It’s slightly better on MacOS, where programs using MacOS-specific APIs can restore their state on startup, but that doesn’t include most of the third-party applications. But MacOS doesn’t force the reboot. Yet.
Never. Microsoft has lost my trust forever with these issues.
I may upgrade when the OS is "finished." For now, though, I think I'll let others trudge through the mud of a forced public beta.
Maybe, just maybe, I might take the plunge when the video games I built my PC for actually require me to.
Until then? No thank you.
I'm not shy about installing updates, but if I'm busy working I would delay it a couple times. Then I'd not use the laptop for a few days (with it in sleep mode), by then I'd have forgotten about the update. I was bitten by forced reboots in 7 many times.
8 added a "Your PC will reboot in 15 minutes" and that was so much better from a laptop perspective. W10 insider builds currently tell you to set "inactive hours", and this works fairly well for both phone and laptop. My phone updates while I sleep, my laptop pings me to reboot at my leisure, for it is never awake & inactive.
Anecdote: When I worked dispatch, the local Network Operations Center pushed out an update that forcibly rebooted all of our Windows workstations...including the machine that ran inbound emergency calls. The admins at the NOC didn't think that anyone would dial 911 at three in the morning. No malfeasance, but a simple lack of foresight.
In the 3am 911 case, those admins could EASILY have cost LIVES with their decision. If that inbound call handler's machine had updates waiting, or more especially had any difficulty installing those updates, you could've had HOURS of downtime in a scenario where MINUTES mean life or death!
I guess my main point is that naivete like that is called criminal negligence and is punishable under the law in many cases. There may have been no malicious intent, but in a case so potentially catastrophic, it hardly matters, and if those admins didn't get into DEEP TROUBLE, they're either very lucky or your administrative discipline system is VERY broken.
And Microsoft is straying into similar territory with this whole thing.
And that's why a liaison from the "business" side of the organization should be in those meetings too.
Our commander talked to their commander, I'm sure at least one finger was wagged at them in disapproval.
If a computer system is so mission-critical that it should never updated, well, Windows has a setting for that-- so turn it on!
On this laptop I actually had it download Windows 10 but I wasn't ready to upgrade so I held it off for another week. I still had to press something to get it to start.
Sneaky of Microsoft, but I'm having trouble buying these tales of the OS going rogue. I just haven't seen any way for that to happen.
If you can't reboot your computer for over two days, you may want to rethink your workflow... I tend to completely shutdown/restart at least every night/morning, and if I had critical pending updates, would probably let them run at lunch, just closing everything before that. This happens maybe once a month, and is just the cost of having a computer...
"Oh man, I have to stop my car and turn it off to get gas once a week. Or when I get my oil changed every few months..."
Edit: On Windows I often run jobs overnight that take 6-7 hours to complete. It's annoying to discover in the morning that Windows aborted my job to install some update, and I have to restart the thing for the next night. This never happens on Ubuntu.
Also, restarting to install updates while in the middle of a presentation at work was disrupting and humiliating. Happened to me.
That computer hosts a Linux VM which I connect to remotely from work and use for most of my development efforts... I use it every day without fail, yet Windows thinks my computer is "idle" simply because I'm not physically sitting at the terminal moving the mouse and keyboard.
I realize that's a perfectly reasonable heuristic for your average desktop user; but something about the messaging and voice of Windows 10 just really rubs me the wrong way. Previous versions of Windows seemed much less chatty, whereas now everything feels so presumptuous and autonomous all under the guise of "Cortana knows your habits better than you do."
I get that volunteering to beta-test comes with some pain, but I literally went to go use the bathroom mid-day, and I came back to Windows 10 reverting to an older build. Bizarre.
