The real story here is the forced updates. How do people who are planning demos and presentations handle this? It's my worst nightmare.
I watch movies on my laptop while I exercise. One day I was about to start exercising and Windows was like "Would you like to update now or in 10 minutes?" And I was like "I'm going to watch my movie," and set back my system clock, and surprisingly, it worked.
(I find this experience funny because moving back the clock was a knee-jerk reaction and it actually worked)
A while ago I reported that the pw field in W10 gave away a lot of entropy easily (basically ctrl+arrow keys stopped between every character class so if your password was: newr..!VYIV you could in five seconds conclude that the password contains of 4 chars of something, then 3 chars of something else, then 4 characters of something other than the second group.)
Whoever handled it concluded that it was absolutely "interesting" but not a security issue so no bounty for me :-/
This of course assumes the entered password is still on the screen.
That said, once you can leave a usb stick attached to targets computer I'd say all bets are off since at that point we can be reasonable secure that the target won't notice a USB or PS2 keyboard sniffer either, giving you plaintext passwords.
And good luck fixing that, especially if your hard-drive is encrypted.
To use a car analogy: modern car's safety measures would probably protect me in case of an accident, but there is no way of being sure. So I'd rather avoid crashing into things at great cost.
Granted, I don't think there's a way to properly shut down without the update in an I-have-five-minutes scenario. But it does, at least, warn you.
Usually. I see enough students who mess up their machines due to hard poweroffs during updates to say that sometimes it does not work out.
So I'll go with powering down shouldn't hurt it.
It wasn't however update related. The user went to shutdown, the computer said "no" (apps are open, blah blah) and the user held the power button down.
In the folder %Windows%\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestrator remove write permissions for all users from the reboot file.
https://techjourney.net/permanently-disable-prevent-automati...
You can configure it to not update while anyone is logged in, only manual, at a set time, etc. It's just not in any of the "usual" settings menues. Likely rationalized by average users not disabling security updates by accident or something.
And yes I am completely aware that Windows 10 updates are in no way comparable to the civil rights movement and I am in no way making any such comparison.
I am just quoting a witty man.
My friend said "how much did you pay for Windows 10." I said "nothing, it's free update." then he said "There you go."
And I could even use SELinux so even as root, couldn't kill it. That's what "System" is, right?
/grrrr
You paid for the original system that you updated from. If you are outside the 30-day window (which you are, because the free offer is over for more than 30 days), you cannot go back to the old system.
So you didn't get the system for free, you exchanged it for the old one. Just the act of the exchange was free, which does not make the system free.
Newly bought Windows 10 licenses are not free either.
For lower versions (like "Home"), there is a way to tell it that your connection is "Metered" and then updated won't be downloaded automatically; but that's not an official method to prevent updates.
http://www.windowscentral.com/how-set-ethernet-connection-me...
It's not the only thing, though. Win 10 is a decent OS in most ways, but there are too many places where it does things that I don't want and I can't (easily?) change.
I use Windows because I do C# development for a living. For now, it's not practical for me to switch, but maybe it will be in a few years. I'm hoping so.
Really stupid to drive developers off of your OS, Microsoft.
The best you can hope for here is that you can do the bulk of your C# development on a "rogue" Linux machine or VM, and then do some final testing and bug-fixing on Windows, since it's going to be deployed on Windows with customers (internal or external) who use Windows.
i predominantly work in java; and while windows is the "official" development environment (more by default than by decree) there weren't any objections or policies against using linux, as nothing in the workflow is tied to a single platform. (hooray!)
Of course you'll have to remember to turn it on to check for updates, but that's no different from using manual updates in past versions of Windows. The only downside is that certain things, i.e. Add/remove features might not work 100% while the service is disabled.
It took the better part of 10 minutes to apply updates. Thankfully it was nothing pressing I was going on the switch. I have disabled auto updates with a registry hack. Microsoft isn't serious about Windows and is now treating it like an OS used for petty un-important work
http://betanews.com/2016/06/09/control-when-windows-10-insta...
I still have a windows machine for occasional games. What drives me nuts is "Install Updates and Shut Down" leads to a 15 minute boot time. WTF? I thought all that was supposed to finish before the computer turned off???
There is a general selection of games I play but can only play on windows. In general I settle for the Mac graphics stack proforming on par with Windows.
So yes, it might be a paperweight if you're a big Call of Duty fan, but it's hardly a paperweight to everybody :)
This is amazing because Windows 10 is barely more than a year old!
Recently I bought a pretty expensive ASUS laptop, 2K and it comes with Home edition. At this point I can buy an upgrade license from MS for about $100 or buy a full retail Windows 10 license for > $200.
Note that the use of "we" (instead of "Windows") is a tad unusual, and maybe a little ominous, for Microsoft.
I'd love to have the annoying old windows update nag box with the postpone button back.
I've had these forced reboots happen a couple times and it's disruptive but that's about it. The most disruptive was when I was working on a project and stopped for dinner then never came back and left my desktop on overnight. The next day I discovered that my computer had rebooted and was at the login prompt.
I can see how this would really suck for applications that do not respect the shutdown notification that Windows broadcasts but even the Arduino IDE dutifully saved my work.
I suspect that over time app developers will pay more attention to OS level event notifications and we'll get to a point similar to Mobile or even MacOS where apps can be halted and resumed at will. Personally that sounds like heaven.
Well actually......twice in the past seven days I had updates installed during my "work hours" and it still went ahead and did the 20 minute reboot warning thing during the same specified work hours in the same day.
It sounds like heaven to have the capability. It sounds like hell to be forced to use it just because the computer's doing something you didn't ask it to.
I think about my browser not restoring tabs after crashing and I shudder because that happens at least once a week. Notepad++ has had this saved state functionality for a while and I take advantage of it quite a bit. I think it would be great if every application did it. Most core Apple applications can resume after reboot.
In the context of forced updates, one would be forced to use it (or deal with recovery of what they were doing on their own).
> Loss of power, system hangs, and program lockups come to mind as situations where it would be nice.
Absolutely. But in these cases, it's acting as a way from recovering from a system exception. The few times that I've recently had a system unexpectedly restart (pulled plug on a laptop with a dead battery, for instance), things like saved browser sessions were great. I just don't like it as the mitigation of negative effects of a system-enforced reboot.
I was speaking more in general and less in that context.
> I just don't like it as the mitigation of negative effects of a system-enforced reboot.
I don't either but I don't consider it all bad. Honestly the session resuming capability of Android and iOS is a great selling point and one that's sorely missed on desktop operating systems. Apple has done a great job bringing it to their core apps but how widely available is it beyond that? In a way Microsoft's policy of forced updates might expedite the spread of this feature.
Putting my conspiracy hat on, Microsoft was and still sort of is pushing everyone towards UWP which promotes this sort of application design at the core. Maybe this is how they force everyone to it.
Manually run the update check every 2-3 days and run it again two hours before the presentation. Any updates that come out in that two hour window will allow you at least one delay.
Come on, folks, this isn't exactly rocket science here. Keep your OS up to date and, surprisingly enough, you won't have any problems caused by it being not up to date.
EDIT: May I also remind everyone that your corporate IT security policy almost certainly requires you to keep the OS on your work PCs up to date?
Wouldn't two hours be too short to fix any problems caused by the update?
The approach they've taken of making things mandatory is clearly not universally popular but most of the arguments about it tend to ignore the fact that it was designed to solve a very real problem which affected millions of people.
Same with linux.
Same with android.
Same with IOS.
If you prompt the user to update, they generally will.
There are two reasons why this works out better. One is that the non-Microsoft world isn't dominated by enterprise IT departments demanding binary compatibility with antique code; the second is that those platforms have spent many years building trust that major upgrades won't prevent you from working. In the case of Windows, that was complicated by charging for updates and the broken IT culture which resisted them amplified with the rough Windows Vista release cycle causing many people to avoid it for a decade.
That sounds like an even bigger time sink than the whole "find a new Debian derivative because Unity breaks the alt key, and systemd breaks everything else" thing.
I am surprised to be asked by adults to think of a solution to a broken laptop given two whole hours in which to find a solution. (Hint: borrow somebody else's laptop.)
Software is meant to serve us, not the other way around. Updates can wait for when we're ready, it's a purely coded decision to resolve otherwise. There is no value, worth, expertise, or pride to be extracted from being a slave to your machine which makes it all the more stunning that this is still happening to people today and that people like you can excuse it.
End to end tech checks (including your software stack) is just part of respecting your audience.
I think some people run into surprise software updates because they do demonstrations on a virtual machine. I don't think that's a good idea, but if you're going to present on VM images, it's just good practice to test out your environment before you present on it.
Note: I'm not making any statement here about how I think software updates should be installed or how Windows works. I've blogged about controlling Windows Updates over the years, here's a post from a decade ago: https://weblogs.asp.net/jongalloway/438009. This comment is about how I make sure, as a developer and presenter, that software updates don't affect my presentations.
Disclaimer: Microsoft employee, Nazgûl
What about non-tech savvy people who expect a computer to work like an appliance and "the bloody uupdate broke my presentation software".
The problem with the world today is there are too many bloody software dwvelopers, too many who seem so keen on sacrificing stability and compatibility with "The Next Thing".
As someone who works with computers and machines in a fabrication shop that, CNC machines that have never had a software update but they still work day in day out, and UI element that don't move or disappear on a weekly basis, I have to say my personal experience of smartphones and computers (Mac, Windows, Linux) is this: OH MY FUCKING GOD WHY DID THEY CHANGE THAT. WHY DOES IT DO THAT. STOP CHANGING EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME.
Yep, computers are huge piles of black-box shit to the average person, who expects their computer to be more like an appliance.
OK, it's possible to work around if you take special care. No one should have to pay that much attention to their update schedule.
> Keep your OS up to date and, surprisingly enough, you won't have any problems caused by it being not up to date.
The problem isn't caused by the machine being not up to date. It's caused by Microsoft requiring forced updates. The computer doing something disruptive that I didn't ask it to do is something that I associate with malicious software; it shouldn't be something that I expect from my OS.
> EDIT: May I also remind everyone that your corporate IT security policy almost certainly requires you to keep the OS on your work PCs up to date?
They do. I typically have 2 weeks of warning, and the chance to update anytime within that time period. I am warned repeatedly as the day approaches that the computer will restart on its own. Patch sets are released monthly, so it's not particularly onerous.