For a long time I have seen Microsoft as being evil in tactics but good in what they provide for developers. I use Microsoft’s tools to do my job and find that the majority of my experience doing so is positive. This is why I consider that I have a love/hate relationship with them.
The other day however, I was working and got notified that I needed to install an update from Microsoft, so I went ahead and had it do the install. Keep in mind that I was in the middle of doing something when I was notified. When the install had finished it asked me if I wanted to restart now or restart later. I clicked “Restart Later” and believed that would be the end of it. Within five or ten minutes I was getting notified again with the exact same question. “Restart Now” or “Restart Later”. This was getting very irritating.
Now, if you find yourself asking, “why didn’t you just restart?”, well then you’ve never been in my situation before. I was running and debugging code and trying to fix a problem with my work. When my mind gets into it, it is counter productive to pull away and have to wait. My mind gets on other things and I don’t tend to return to my work with the same vigor as I had before
After several hours of being notified every couple minutes, I realized I needed to download a large amount of data, so I started that process. I had to leave for a while and figured when I came back the download would be finished.
Bwah haa haa haaa haaaa!!! (I can hear Steve Ballmer laughing out loud).
There’s going to be none of that!! You think you have control over your own computer? Well, you don’t. And apparently Microsoft thinks you shouldn’t. When I returned to my computer later, it had restarted without getting the ok from me!!!! What the *&%#$!!!
I suppose part of the problem is that Microsoft doesn’t like getting blamed for security problems and so they enforce that you restart and accept the update, but this is just ridiculous. At least give me a third option on the reminder dialog that says “I will restart my computer as soon as I’m done with my work, I promise.” next to the “Restart Now”, and “Restart Later” buttons. C’mon Microsoft, I love the dev tools, but this crap makes me love to hate you!
This is one of my pet hates with Windows. The scary thing is that this just doesn’t happen on desktop Windows, this also happens on the various flavours of Windows Server software.
I left my server running backups from a few of my desktop computers overnight to wake up and find that it had restarted mid way, stopping the back up in the process. This was ok cause i just had to redo backup but if i had been in the middle of something more critical I would have been insanely mad!