Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Automatic restarts

My SO and I just finished baking a cake, and upon coming back to our computers we found that both of our Windows boxes, on which we'd left quite a bit of work open and in-progress, had rebooted themselves automatically.

The culprit was Windows XP's automatic security updates, which by default automatically downloads and installs updates at 3am every day. The default setting also automatically restarts the computer once the updates are installed; if you're not there at the precise time to stop the reboot, Windows just closes everything and reboots. Have anything open in your browser that you didn't want closed? Too bad.

To stop the automatic rebooting you can change the automatic updates settings via the "security center" in the control panel, but doing so results in a very large "CHECK SETTINGS" warning.

This has to be one of the most annoying "features" I've ever seen. Is Microsoft actually trying to encourage me to use Linux more?

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