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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

I find it ironic that Windows was long derided for being unstable and in constant need of reboots, and now they're basically deliberately reducing uptime.

Unwanted "new features" and the aspect of silently changing behaviour aside, the technology to patch files in memory and on disk without having to restart or otherwise disturb unnecessarily the entire system has been around for a very long time (and amusingly enough, malware is probably the biggest application of those techniques today); and sending only diffs instead of entire files which may be 99% the same as before would probably save a huge amount of bandwidth.

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I was discussing with a friend on solutions on how to make your PC being 'never idle'. As he told me, if the PC is never idle, then Win10 won't enforce any updates/reboots.

I do not know how true is that, but when I suggested he use MouseJiggler [1] he thanked me and told me 'it worked'. It is a stand-alone/portable .exe that 'does exactly what it says on the tin'. I use it to keep away screensavers/screenlocks (on machines I don't 100% control).

[1]: https://mouse-jiggler.en.uptodown.com/windows

Edit: I keep away from W10 so I don't know to what extend this would help. I assume it would delay unwanted reboots, but I don't know the W10 update-forcing mechanism, and on the diagram depicted on the article I don't see any 'idling' criteria.

There is a nice little tool to stop the reboots:

https://www.udse.de/en/windows-10-reboot-blocker

It changes the active hours every hour so that you will never be outside of active hours.

Years ago I followed a guide I found online [0] which involves renaming the "Reboot" scheduled task file and creating a folder with the same name in its location, so that the OS fails to re-create the task file. Haven't had an unexpected reboot since.

This technique was familiar to me from the Kindle jailbreaking scene, in which creating a directory with a certain path would cause the Kindle's auto-updater to error out when it tried to `rm` what it saw as a preexisting partially-downloaded update file (the Kindle's OS is Linux-based, so the file-delete operation fails on a directory).

[0] https://www.windowscentral.com/how-prevent-windows-10-reboot... (including the "Additional Steps")

But when you need to reboot for any other reason (e.g. Windows bugs out), then the update happens, and your have to wait.

Shift-shutdown didn't prevent this either.

Unexpected updates was a primary reason I am now using Linux full time (rather than part time as previously).

A keyboard-based similar tool is Zhorn's Caffeine which puts a pot of coffee in your system tray and presses F24(?) every 15 seconds.

Uptime is not in itself a number to chase as long as that interruption doesn't come at the cost of your time and effort. Home users don't care about uptime, they care about using their computer without forced interruptions.

And that's what MS should be focusing on: doing the updates as unobtrusively as possible.

Perhaps that’s fine for home users but I’ve lost days of test data thanks to Windows deciding that it’s a good time to update. Windows 10 is not a suitable OS for any kind of professional work IMHO.

Edit: that’s not mentioning how Microsoft’s aggressive telemetry is probably exfiltraring sensitive corporate info unintentionally.

How does that contradict what I said?

> they care about using their computer without forced interruptions

> MS should be focusing on: doing the updates as unobtrusively as possible

How exactly did your problem happen? There are ways to manage this so it doesn't cause this kind of loss. It's not ideal that you have to use them but if you work with valuable data you should take all precautions out of principle.

Oops, that's a reading comprehension fail on my part.

I now know there are (hacky, unsupported) ways around it. But on principle, I should not have to fight my OS for control of the computer.

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