New Study Shows Windows 10 Home Edition Users Are Baffled By Updates (zdnet.com) 221
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Since the initial release of Windows 10 nearly four years ago, Microsoft has been tweaking its approach to automatic updates, adding Active Hours settings to ensure that mandatory restarts are less likely to be intrusive. Recent feature updates have also made notifications of pending updates more obvious. Are those changes enough to ease the pain? A new study from a group of UK-based researchers suggests Microsoft has more work to do. The study, titled "In Control with No Control: Perceptions and Reality of Windows 10 Home Edition Update Features," was presented this week at the Workshop on Usable Security (USEC) 2019 in San Diego, California. Researchers Jason Morris, Ingolf Becker, and Simon Parkin of University College London, built a detailed model of Microsoft's update process as of Windows 10 version 1803 and then surveyed a group of 93 Windows 10 Home users.
The overall conclusions were a mixed bag. In general, the survey respondents think that the Windows 10 update approach is an improvement over that found in previous Windows versions. Among participants who had experience with earlier Windows versions 53 percent reported they felt updating Windows 10 is easier, versus only 8 percent who found the process more difficult. Similarly, a majority of respondents agreed that the Windows 10 update process causes fewer interruptions than in previous versions (43 percent agreed, 21 percent disagreed). Where Microsoft has fallen down, the researchers argue, is in building an update system that is "dependent on a complex range of user and system properties." That system, illustrated by the flowchart shown here, is simply too complicated for the average home user to understand.
The overall conclusions were a mixed bag. In general, the survey respondents think that the Windows 10 update approach is an improvement over that found in previous Windows versions. Among participants who had experience with earlier Windows versions 53 percent reported they felt updating Windows 10 is easier, versus only 8 percent who found the process more difficult. Similarly, a majority of respondents agreed that the Windows 10 update process causes fewer interruptions than in previous versions (43 percent agreed, 21 percent disagreed). Where Microsoft has fallen down, the researchers argue, is in building an update system that is "dependent on a complex range of user and system properties." That system, illustrated by the flowchart shown here, is simply too complicated for the average home user to understand.
My computer restarts randomly at night (Score:5, Informative)
Re:My computer restarts randomly at night (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah - having a Windows 10 system in sleep mode is annoying, because it'll actually WAKE UP the system in order to tell me I need to apply an update. Super annoying when I'm trying to sleep and I hear that "computer waking up" fan noise.
There's something to be said for priorities - computers are arguably supposed to serve the interests of folks that own the computers. Taking all that away just to serve the public relations/"security" interests of Microsoft in fixing their security issues seems an intense, giant waste of human annoyance and time, along with other rational ownership issues..
A better game theory strategy would be for Microsoft to have to email us with cash offers to update our systems within a timeframe, and we just don't get the $2 or whatever if we are busy and don't want to update.
These increasing waves of punishment for not wanting to be bothered about increasingly draconian update cycles won't end well - and if anything, will result in companies increasing in this pattern of carelessness in design and testing.
Ryan Fenton
Re:My computer restarts randomly at night (Score:5, Insightful)
Taking all that away just to serve the public relations/"security" interests of Microsoft in fixing their security issues seems an intense, giant waste of human annoyance and time, along with other rational ownership issues..
I would be fine with the updates if they were just for security issues. I'm sick of having to remove all the new Microsoft crapware every time a computer installs its gigabytes of updates. Why the hell does Win10 Enterprise have software for XBox anyway? Fortunately I only have to deal with it at work and at home I can use a reasonable OS where I control the updates but it's still maddening.
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But you need Cortana as part of the OS...Unless it's an educational version of Win10. Plus System Guard is there to protect you komrade & Compatibility services is just to make system stable.
I've stopped chasing down the useless services that keep getting switched back on & I'm just thankful the (cr)app store has stayed dead so far.
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Reality, they are not generic updates, they are specifically individual targeted, forced software install because they own you digital life as far as they are concerned with full right to, force software installs, invade you privacy and delete software and content right off your computer, all this at any time for any reason. That is not what is called a software security update, that is factually the exact opposite, stripping away every right to security and privacy you have. ESAD M$.
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I would be fine with the updates if they weren't multiple gigabytes - there's such an incredible amount of waste of bandwidth in having Windows 10.
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Why the hell does Win10 Enterprise have software for XBox anyway?
Because whoever rolled out your Enterprise release to your computer was an idiot? I mean you're talking about the one release where the Xbox software (along with a large portion of what ships with windows) is actually optional.
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So I am required to create a custom installer to avoid installing tons of Microsoft crapware? Yes, I've done it before, and it's an incredibly convoluted process. Most of my exposure to Windows 10 are installs in a VM lab to test software against different environments. These are ISOs downloaded from MSDN - I shouldn't have to make a custom installer to avoid installing Xbox crap, or Groove Music, or Cortana, or One Note, or Skype, or MS Solitaire Collection, or MS Money, or Movies and TV, or MS News, or
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So I am required to create a custom installer to avoid installing tons of Microsoft crapware?
Yes that is literally what Microsoft requires people to do when rolling out Enterprise Windows.
Yes, I've done it before, and it's an incredibly convoluted process.
A process that needs to be done once for however many of thousands of machines you process. I mean we are talking about Windows 10 Enterprise here. You do mean this is a work machine managed in a central IT group right? Because there's no other legal way you'd be running that specific version of Windows you are complaining about.
Which brings me back to my point, why would I ever need XBox software on my Enterprise installation?
Hmmm I wonder if there's any companies you can think of that develop games? Nope I can
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So I am required to create a custom installer to avoid installing tons of Microsoft crapware?
Yes that is literally what Microsoft requires people to do when rolling out Enterprise Windows.
Do they? I have installed it a number of times but generally don't create a custom installer. Like I said in my previous post (nice reading comprehension BTW) I install from the ISO available on MSDN, so obviously MS doesn't "require" it. It would be incredibly simple to have a setup screen to select which components I do and don't want to install but they decided that didn't fit their marketing goals.
Yes, I've done it before, and it's an incredibly convoluted process.
A process that needs to be done once for however many of thousands of machines you process. I mean we are talking about Windows 10 Enterprise here. You do mean this is a work machine managed in a central IT group right? Because there's no other legal way you'd be running that specific version of Windows you are complaining about.
I don't install thousands of machines, I'm not a Windows sysadmin and never want to be. I install a sev
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I don't install thousands of machines, I'm not a Windows sysadmin and never want to be.
So it's no surprise that you're quite literally doing it wrong. The windows enterprise ISO is nothing more than windows Pro with the additional tools on it to roll out using Microsoft Window's Autopilot. You're getting almost no benefits of Windows Enterprise by just installing it in a way it wasn't designed to be.
So again, just because you installed the Enterprise release in a way it's not meant to be installed, doesn't mean that it isn't fully customisable for enterprises including removing the very thing
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The big question is why XBox software is even on the vanilla installation of Enterprise.
Re:My computer restarts randomly at night (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes THIS. Windows reboots and nukes everything I have open. Then for a fun part it kills off Google, and since it probably rebooted several times in the night without saying, the Google Chrome restore option is gone and all those Tabs with stuff to read are all gone.
No Its not OK, and I have turned off the auto rebooting, but it still does it.
We are working for the computers again, not the other way around.
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There is a fix for this. There should be a UI for it, but there isn't so you have to do this manually.
First go to task scheduler and disable reboot task. That doesn't really disable it though.
Next go to %windir%\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator and rename the "Reboot" file. Unfortunately Windows will create a new one when it noticed you tried to stop it destroying your work, so now create an empty directory called "Reboot" in the same location. Fortunately Windows isn't clever enough to d
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If "I for one welcome out new X overlords" is still going I think this one has plenty of mileage left.
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1. Have a Slashdot ID with six or less digits
2. Continue to use the same dozen memes because this is the Internet and memes never die
3. ???
4. Profit!
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Then for a fun part it kills off Google, and since it probably rebooted several times in the night without saying, the Google Chrome restore option is gone and all those Tabs with stuff to read are all gone.
Ctrl+Shit+T will restore the previous tab layout, even through multiple reboots, and clean shutdown of Chrome.
No Its not OK, and I have turned off the auto rebooting, but it still does it.
It will do it after 7 days. If you're shutting down at a random unknown time then you've setup something incorrectly or ignored the message which prompts you to go to settings and actually specify precisely *when* you want to install the update.
The only thing I'm missing is a way to reboot the computer without installing the update. That was available previously but I haven't seen that in Windows 10
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What if you're rendering a video? That can take a number of hours that you would rather do while asleep. Or uploading a large file to a server via an FTP client or web browser? The OS can't easily tell whether any of those things happen without making it look like spyware. The whole system is shit, and frankly Linux and MacOSX handle it much better: the system file locks that require a restart for updating literally everything Windows is annoying, Linux and OS/X don't need to reboot unless a huge or kern
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My complaint exactly. Win10 has shaped up to be a nonstarter for folks in research and data analysis who have tasks running for many days at a time.
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I'm sure NeoRUR could do that, but why can't this person just leave their computer on with an open web browser and 15 tabs open? If they have the ram and don't mind paying for the power, why not? Seems pretty lame that the computer is restarting without permission.
A user should be able to leave a computer on and a web browser open without ever having to worry about a reboot unless they themselves tell the computer to reboot.
All the more reason to stop using Windows.
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I've had it reboot a few days into a big calculation. I now have a scheduled task which updates my "active hours" every hour so that automatic rebooting is disabled, but that really shouldn't be necessary.
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A lot of the time, I have open files and it just nukes everything. I've never figured out how that's OK.
A lot of the time I have open files so when the message comes up saying there's an update waiting to be installed I specifically delay it for 1 week knowing full well I will at some point reboot my computer and install the update then.
Lean to computer right.
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Re: My computer restarts randomly at night (Score:5, Funny)
That's what he said.
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This is the reason tablets are so popular now. They make computers literally idiot-proof.
Particularly, they don't force slow time-consuming updates on you, and don't spontaneously reboot. My tablet (and my phone) occationally informs me that some apps were upgraded. I didn't even notice. But I am in control - I can disable automatic updates if I want to.
They also sometimes tell me there is a new OS update that will require a reboot. I can put that off for as long as I like - my hand is never forced. And when I go for the update, it is just a couple of minutes. No questions asked during the upda
Rebooting is the stupid and lazy way anyway (Score:4, Interesting)
I chuckle a bit when people talk about letting the user choose what time to shutdown the entire machine for 30 minutes while Windows updates whatever - the color picker dialog and the wifi UI or whatever.
Twenty years ago, tou used to have to rebuild Linux if you updated the KERNEL. Only the kernel ever needed a reboot. Anything else, the update just saves the new version of the file to disk. If it's a running service you.want to update, restart that service. Updating the file sharing service means you restart file sharing, which takes three seconds. Why in the world do Microsoft programmers find it necessary to shut down the machine, and then extract the new version of the file? Do they really not know how to save a file on a system that is running?
Ten or fifteen years ago, Linux got live kernel updates. No need to reboot to activate the new kernel. Most people probably reboot into a new kernel out of habit and inertia, but that's the only time you'd reboot a Linux box related to an update. I had a machine up for eight years until I moved. It stayed updated.
Windows got multi-user security (DAC) 10-20 years after Unix and Linux. Windows got modern security, MAC (or at least a watered down simulation of it) about 10 years after Linux. Windows gets a lot of things 10-20 years after Linux does. Maybe it'll get the ability to update a file without shutting down the entire machine, in a few years.
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Rotfl (Score:2)
Linux is used in far more roles professionally than Windows is, and is far, far more reliable. By orders of magnitude. Windows is designed for desktop use by people who need to see their options displayed in a graphical menu because otherwise they wouldn't know how to use their computer - they wouldn't know which command to type. It serves pretty well in that limited role.
> You're asking for a crash or some unexpected interaction if another piece of software expects a different version
True, if yo
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This is the reason tablets are so popular now. They make computers literally idiot-proof.
Particularly, they don't force slow time-consuming updates on you, and don't spontaneously reboot. My tablet (and my phone) occationally informs me that some apps were upgraded. I didn't even notice. But I am in control - I can disable automatic updates if I want to.
Should I mention the Windows Tablets to both of you? They are unusable, especially with Atom chips (and I assume the new Celeron+Pentium Silver). Whereas and Android tablet I could charge once per week (with light usage every evening), the Windows tablet I would find it was drained on the 2nd night. Every time I wanted to use it for something quick, either it would be very slow (just found and update) or already asking me to reboot with less than 20% battery (when I charged it the evening before). Did I men
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Imagine a slave plantation without chains, without a foreman, without whips, without fences. Sooner or later I start to think that maybe it's not a slave plantation since the "slaves" are completely free to leave any time they want and they stay there because they want to. Sooner or later I cease to have sympathy for them because they're actually doing it to themselves.
If you're still on Windows then it's your fault this stuff keeps happening to you.
That analysis doesn't apply to programmers and IT people who are stuck with using Windows at their jobs. SOME of them could find other jobs at companies that use Linux or Mac - but that's a really small percentage. In other industries, folks require the ability to use software that's only available for Windows. LibreOffice is remarkable, but its compatibility with MS Office still has some serious failings. And GIMP + Inkscape + Scribus often can't replace the Adobe suite. There are lots more examples. The '
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And then suffer all the exact same frustrations with that VM still restarting itself and reducing productivity whenever the hell it feels like it?
I have them disabled (Score:5, Informative)
There's some dark magic you can do to disable the automatic reboot. I did it months ago when I built my new workstation -- there's a folder buried deep under System32 that contains the 'Reboot' script. If you remove that and replace it with a folder named 'Reboot', then it will always fail to run the reboot-after-update phase of the update cycle.
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https://www.windowscentral.com/how-prevent-windows-10-rebooting-after-installing-updates - Task scheduler
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Yeah, that was the one that worked. Wasn't not lazy enough to google it.
According to systeminfo my box hasn't restarted since 2019-02-08, 8:59:56 PM, which was a power outage iirc.
Re:I have them disabled (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft has designed the entire update process under the assumption that it can reboot the computer at will, so strange things can happen when you intentionally delay that reboot. It's gotten to where I just start the troubleshooting process with a reboot.
and they think that hyper-v server can just reboot (Score:2)
and they think that an hyper-v server can just reboot.
Now if they can get to work in cluster mode with auto live migration and rolling reboots then do it but on server needs to have active hours (With no can't be bigger then X hour gap and can set to say one day a week) Also have server updates full control *with out needing to set GPO's for both 2019 and 2016
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The problem with that is some of the updates dismantle some essential services (like the network), to prepare them to be updated upon reboot.
Why on earth would that happen before the reboot? There has to be a staging area for new files that will be written. I've seen this and so many other quirky things when a computer has not been rebooted.
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Doesn't everyone start troubleshooting by just rebooting as the first step? In Windows it usually clears up whatever problem someone has.
That should be the first step - reboot the computer and see if the user's problem has cleared up. Chances are, it has
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That will only work until Microsoft catch on, then it'll be disabled. It's a constant arms race between people trying to make their computers obey, and Microsoft forcing everyone to use Windows the way Microsoft intended.
People find a hack or registry key or something to disable something annoying, then people write articles on how to disable the annoying thing, then Microsoft break it because it's not intended functionality.
Re:I have them disabled (Score:5, Insightful)
Better than disabling the reboots is disabling the forced updates altogether.
Remember the whole travesty with the Windows 10 upgrade to begin with? The progression of "optional" updates that Microsoft sent out that did nothing for months then suddenly started popping up "Hey, wouldn't you like to upgrade your OS" notices, then "Hey, you need to upgrade your OS", then "We're going to upgrade your OS for you unless you cancel" and then "Hey we're now just going to do it whether you want to or not". I avoided that because I simply didn't install the update that did that. But now that I have a computer I was forced to accept Windows 10 on, I have to use a combination of Windows Update Blocker to disable a whole series of otherwise un-disableable services, and Windows Update MiniTool to give me back manual control of the update process. Thank heavens for those.
I own my computer and it will do what I tell it to do.
I find it troubling that people like the new system better. I suppose, in the narrowly worded "is Windows 10 update easier" it is true. Subservience is easier. Just give over control to someone else and let them decide what's good for me is easier. But I remember when just the suggestion of that sort of centralized control over the desktop would have gotten Microsoft crucified. We need to go back to that mentality.
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Better than disabling the reboots is disabling the forced updates altogether.
Sex is so much better without a condom. But for some reason I can't shake this fever.
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1) Sure is. Glad not everyone uses one, or you wouldn't be here to post that.
2) This is more akin to everyone in the world being forced to wear a condom as Microsoft rapes you any time they see fit. Wouldn't you like the choice?
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Amazingly yes your choices are regulated for public health reasons.
But there is a better way. Maybe we can put a kill switch in computer that simply boots a computer that hasn't had an update in 7 days off the internet. That'll teach the anti-vaxxers.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Its supposed to be easier because it looks like your phone. Almost every man woman and child on this earth has a phone, therefore everything should be modeled around that UI.
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But there is *no* obstacle to having the classic (i.e. productive) UI as an option. That part of it is entirely Microsoft being cruel just to demonstrate that they have the power to get away with it.
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Thankfully many of those elderly have no problems navigating an XFCE desktop for all their Facebook, email and printing needs.
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Try explaining to an elderly person who's used to 95/XP/7 how to get around Win10. Everything's hidden, icons that are confusing, and the modern desktop UI just baffles them to the point where they just give up..
Don't bother explaining - just nuke Win10, install Xubuntu, give them a short tutorial, and be done. Seriously, non-power-users who are comfortable with earlier, saner generations of Windows represent a perfect use case for the friendlier Linux distros and DE's. It doesn't take a lot of work to set up XFCE under Ubuntu so that it's WAY more like XP than Win10 could ever be.
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Re: Elderly don't get Win10 (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people don't think in terms of concepts like shortcuts. They click Start and click Programs and click the thing they want. If Programs becomes "Applications" but everything else remains the same, they get lost. They don't understand, they memorise steps.
These people need to re-learn workflows when you move the contents of "Programs" onto the base Start menu and make it a different color. Many people don't have decent computer skills. Unfortunately it's not just the elderly, either.
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Why the fuck should I have to constantly keep relearning the UI layout? It feels like every iteration of Windows buries more of the settings and control panel options while also moving or adds extra categories.
I remember sitting down at my nephews Win 8 box a few years back and just saying, WTF is this terrible interface? It looked like it was designed to be used with a touch screen and that was it. I quickly decided I would just use my phone instead.
I feel sorry for my wife as she is going to have to move
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First, you can pick category or small/large icons in Control Panel. Second, Control Panel dates way way way back, and while it is still there, more and more functionality is being moved to the new Settings. If you don't want to learn anything new, ever, then you might want to switch to a Mac where nothing ever changes.
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First, you can pick category or small/large icons in Control Panel. Second, Control Panel dates way way way back, and while it is still there, more and more functionality is being moved to the new Settings. If you don't want to learn anything new, ever, then you might want to switch to a Mac where nothing ever changes.
If you really think things have remain unchanged in the Apple ecosystem, I dare you to throw OS 9 in front of the average GenY hipster. They'll be just as clueless.
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Like why was the control panel - a nice, central repository of system settings and related items - gutted and the relevant controls spread randomly about the place with no obvious underlying logic?
I'm only half joking when I say that it was done in order to give people less control over their computers and less confidence in exercising that control. It plays into the 'software as a service' flavour of the rent-seeking model that ALL corporations are trying to establish as the immutable new order of things.
Come to think of it... no, I'm not half joking - I'm not joking at all. I really do believe that's what they're up to.
Error Messages (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixing *that* should be a top priority for Microsoft.
Re:Error Messages (Score:5, Informative)
It's not just that they're cryptic, they're the magic combination of cryptic and useless. Linux errors are cryptic, but they're at least extremely detailed and helpful to developers if you put them in a bug report.
Windows error codes might as well be replaced with a frown emoji.
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Windows error codes might as well be replaced with a frown emoji.
Thanks for that! Made my night - I'm still laughing...
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Windows error codes might as well be replaced with a frown emoji.
That's literally what they did in Windows 10. The blue screen of death is now just a frown emoji and a reassuring message.
Re:Error Messages (Score:5, Insightful)
That's something that I hate: "Updates failed; error 0x00062007" message.
Googling that error number provides mostly generic answers like "this error can be produced when the moon is in the seventh house, try the update troubleshooter"
Or the totally useless "experts" on answers.microsoft.com who tell you to reboot and then run the update troubleshooter.
Re:Error Messages (Score:5, Insightful)
And another thing - that cryptic error message is presented in a graphical dialog box, and you can't cut and paste it to look it up. You have to write it down, and then type it into browser search. What a useless aggravation!
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Or the totally useless "experts" on answers.microsoft.com who tell you to reboot and then run the update troubleshooter.
These people need to be rounded up, taken out behind the shed and shot. I'm not mincing my words. The world is suffering from over population and there are few people quite as utterly useless as the Microsoft "experts".
Error Messages for thee, not for me (Score:2)
Did you just lose the main issue of MS shift to Win 10? They run it. They decide. Why would you think the "cryptic error message" needs to be understood by the user of someone else's OS?
What is cryptic here, is the reason you think you deserve to understand something you pay other people to manage for you. You may have paid, but is has only started to cost you. There was no purchase.
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Fixing *that* should be a top priority for Microsoft.
Cryptic error messages WAS the fix. The previous error message said "Something went wrong :-(" and left you screwed.
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That is probably one of the few comments that is really a GOOD complaint, because the error messages really are so cryptic that very few people can figure out why updates are failing. What I have found in some cases, is that those "reserved" partitions that are created are sometimes used by Windows Update to hold the update files, and if they run out of space, the updates will fail. I haven't run into that in a year or so, but I've learned that if you assign a drive letter to those reserved partitions a
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Nearly 25 years later I remember the Mac error message to this day: "TCP / IP is Unhappy!" - Along with a frowny-face.
I almost pitched the very expensive Macintosh out the window.
Stop calling it Windows 10 already (Score:5, Funny)
Update reboots aren't the only problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Especially since you almost NEVER want the driver updates installed.
They're usually 3 or 4 versions behind the vendor specific drivers, and usually break anyway.
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My favorite button is the fresh install button. They admit their OS is so shitty that it slows down for unknown reasons.
PIck 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Or focus on enterprise, and remove the consumer stuff.
This one size for all OS pisses everyone off.
Two versions (Score:2)
Re: PIck 1 (Score:2)
Are you even responding to the study? It clearly showed that users preferred the update experience in win10 as compared with previous versions of windows. Microsoft is clearly doing something right - more systems are up to date with security fixes (amongst others) and their users prefer the new experience.
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I wonder if many of them shut their computers down regularly, so the forced restarts don't really hurt them.
Maybe some of them feel that Microsoft is an authority here, and that when the computer tells them it needs to restart that's actually welcome advice that they should follow. In other words they don't realize that he restarts may be unnecessary or excessive.
That's the basis on which many scams and viruses work after all - the computer or someone in authority like the fake Microsoft tech support guy is
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What enterprisey stuff need to be removed from the Home edition?
I just checked the Start menu on my work Win10 PC. Only work and Office related apps. Cortana is locked down. Updates are selected and pushed as available for a period of time, then forced install after a date.I need to login with a different account for local admin rights, and that account cannot access the internet through our web proxy.
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There is no one size fits all approach. Enterprise windows allows corporations to control updates, reboots, remove everything including the xbox crap and even the windows store itself.
The real annoying part is that we pro-sumers can't get that good Enterprise version in any legal way.
Comment (Score:2)
Windows 10 is what made 2016 my Year of Linux on the Desktop. I have one legacy Windows 7 device for some Steam stuff (and a tool that converts assets to a format usable on my Linux sytem), and the rest Devuan and Fedora GNU/Linux. Microsoft made me a Linux [desktop] user.
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I also moved my 67 year old (Very nontechnical.) mother to a Linux Mint desktop, and the number of calls I got from her with issues dropped off to almost nothing after the first couple of weeks.
Small data set (Score:2)
IANAP - Not a Programmer (Score:2)
I absolutely must have one program on Win 10. Updates to either the program or OS that disrupt my work is not acceptable under any circumstances.
The final solution for me is drastic, but works: Once the OS is installed & updated once, my key program is loaded and then the Win machine NEVER goes back on a network again.
Data goes in & out via USB key over to a Mac. If I actually needed Win10 to run on that machine on a network it would be on a separate boot drive, but I hate the thought. High secu
but... Windows is a service (Score:2)
Baffling. (Score:2)
New study shows Windows 10 Home Edition users are baffled by light switches.
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Seriously why doesn't it do that now??
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Task scheduler, new task, set it to run on boot with admin privileges. /r /t 3600
shutdown
If you're actually sitting down to use your PC, just run shutdown /a or make a shortcut that does it.
Alternatively, setup another scheduled task that does that on user login.
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Why buy new hardware, just install Linux.
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The problem is users are fuckwits.
"Remind me later" or "ask me tomorrow" -- can, and will be pushed infinitely.
Install upon shutdown / startup -- only updates in the event of a power failure.
This was tried for 15 years from 2k through Win8.
Then you get some exploit that goes wild that was patched 3 months ago and 100 million fuckwits get infected because they refuse to ever do updates when prompted, and refuse to plan to ever do them.
The obnoxious overreach by microsoft here was to address this intractable
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Then you get some exploit that goes wild that was patched 3 months ago and 100 million fuckwits get infected because they refuse to ever do updates when prompted, and refuse to plan to ever do them.
The obnoxious overreach by microsoft here was to address this intractable problem -- regular users won't do critical updates because they're busy / lazy / don't care. And there's millions of them so MS decided listening to them scream about reboots was less bad than the damage done by exploits that were fixed months or even years ago spreading through millions of poorly managed PCs.
I think if Microsoft was only forcing updates for critical security issues everybody would agree with you.
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I think if Microsoft was only forcing updates for critical security issues everybody would agree with you.
Precisely this. Security updates generally tend to be small and install quickly. Odds are pretty good that half of them can be installed transparently and without a reboot.
The problem tends to be the larger updates, especially the 'feature updates' that take hours to install in order to add features nobody asked for.
'Muh Securrity' isn't a justifiable reason why a recent round of updates basically told users their documents and other data would be uploaded to OneDrive by default.
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"I don't think that's very common,"
What on earth are you basing that on?
"Windows should give a decent warning about skipping critical security patches, but ultimately it should be up to the user."
It's a bit like anti-vaxxers. If enough users turn off the updates, or just keep ignoring them, the health of the herd gets pretty vulnerable. And this is exactly what happened over and over again with windows over the last 20 years.
It's what's happening again now all over with IoT garbage, even if updates are avai
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Before we do even that -- consider that you are doing this development for a largely unresponsive and non-subscription userbase. (Home users / SMB users with no IT / etc)
You really just want one code base to maintain at the best of times; but in this case, you REALLY don't want to deal with a multitude of patch levels, and patch configurations.
New PATCH X for home users. Does it work if they are otherwise up to date? Yes. Done. That's all they want to deal with.
Does it break if they have only previous insta