windows update
I coughed up for windows professional on all our home PCs after one of our PCs had something updated while it was being used, causing the keyboard to do something very odd.
So I've told windows to not apply updates unless asked for. And it asks nicely to reboot. Don't see why I should have to pay for this, but for £99/PC it (sadly) seems worth it.
However it's still pretty manky:
- it does not download stuff before notifying it has an update. Result. Update stops for a long while while it's downloading stuff.
- you can't choose which updates to apply (I'm happy to apply defenders update - mostly - recently it decided to quarantine some microsoft control panel, for instance, but leave the rest of the stuff till saturday)
- it appears to bugger off for a pint and a meat pie when it's updating. The progress indicators frankly suck.
- the progress meter is insane. it stops dead for a while then leaps ahead 20 percentage points
- the "I am doing something" spinner somehow magically turns into an "I am not sure what I'm doing so I'll spin this to convince you I'm doing something useful" after about 1 minute, leaving me with the impression the machine has hung.
- it can hang or fail for no reason. Or at least no reason it cares to translate into comprehensible English. And the fixes invariably seem to involve running stuff from an admin window.
None of which appear to be being addressed by the update. It's just attempting to guess better when you aren't using the machine.