Windows’ “Active Hours” shows you’re not in control of your devices (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Windows’ “Active Hours” shows you’re not in control of your devices (2016)

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It was simply arrogance and stupid: How would they know when the user is going to be inactive and the computer can be restarted? A couple of years ago, one of my colleague's computer was rebooted for updating in the middle of a important presentation to his boss and the time needed to complete was over two hours. Now they allow the user to specify an active windows which is a little bit less stupid but my question still stands. Even the user cannot tell exactly when she/he would not be using the computer but for sure M$ product managers decided that they KNOW. And the more funny thing is that the benefit they can get by doing that is very limited or even NIL as how could they ever know what the user would set that that window to and whether the user isn't going to shutdown/put it to sleep/hibernate before inactive windows and power it again later?

Worse is that these forced updates sometimes break your Windows install. I use Windows exclusively for gaming. I have installed: Steam, Steam games, nvidia drivers, and Firefox. Hardly an unreasonable setup. Yet somehow, twice in two years, I’ve been forced to reinstall Windows because a forced update has blown it up and the built-in recovery tools couldn’t restore it.

I use macOS for work. Apple doesn’t force updates to happen. Despite people’s perceptions of Apple being controlling within their walled garden, I actually feel in control of my Mac. I don’t feel in control of my custom-built PC.

Agreed. It’s got to the point now where Windows is in a bubble - I have a 64 GB nvme that windows is installed on, and absolutely nothing else.

The number of times I’ve had to reinstall Windows, it just makes sense to have it isolated so I don’t lose any data.

Except, I inevitably do because Windows finds a way to have files saved and programs installed where I don’t want them.

Interestingly, as of the most recent edition of macOS, this is how macOS structures itself natively.

It will install the OS itself in read only mode (and encrypted) onto a dedicated APFS Volume, with all the data on a separate APFS Volume, both sharing the same container representing the entire boot drive.

As a user you will not notice at all unless you go looking.

This is mainly for security reasons, as I understand it. But, surely this also makes an OS reinstall or recovery much simpler. I have not yet had the luck to need to do either since this installation model was adopted so I don't know what the impact (positive or negative) to the user is in such a scenario.

Anyway, I find it amusing that such a model has only recently been adopted by a mainstream OS after so many decades of the concept being espoused as important in the general Unix-like world. I wonder if Microsoft will follow suit.

That’s also how BSD does it. It’s easier to reinstall the OS then. Not that you’d need to, BSD being as robust as it is.

Try getting rid of the 2GB desktop pictures that come with Catalina then and see how much control you have...

You have control. You can turn off SIP and mount the root partition as read write, then empty out that folder. And modify whatever other system files you like.

I'm sure there are workarounds to disable Windows update too. That's not really the point.

SIP is different. Apple explicitly built these tools with mechanisms to turn them off, for users who wish to do so.

If there’s a Microsoft-created mechanism for disabling automatic updates on non-pro (!) editions of Windows, I would love to know about it. All the methods I’m familiar with are weird hacks that have side effects or don’t always work.

You can disable Windows Update by changing the states of all its services in the registry to "disabled". To my knowledge, this doesn't have any side effects. Updating just no longer works unless you turn the services back on, plain and simple.

While macOS does not force updates, I have never seen update of any other OS to fuck up keyboard driver of a laptop. The laptop is unusable on macOS (internal keyboard not detected), reinstalling macOS does not help, downgrade is not possible, I had to install Kubuntu - and found out it's better than macOS.

Edit: why am I getting downvoted for this? Explain please. The issue won't disappear no matter how hard you downvote.

Look into Tron script (https://www.reddit.com/r/TronScript/comments/idcg0v/tron_v11...) to gain more control over updates and such. I use this on my machine and it works well.

I'm only using my windows computer for playing games, so it's turned off most of the time, it's incredibly annoying to have to wait through updates.. I would just disconnect it entirely from the Internet, but then I can't log into the game-delivery-platforms nor play multiplayer.

It's amazing, considering how much money is in the videogame industry, that we've not yet seen an OS developed specifically for playing games. It could even be shared between consoles and pcs, making it much easier for developers to release for all platforms.

Perhaps that was the vision of SteamOS [1] ?

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/steamos

That’s more of an OS (Linux) adapted for playing games than an OS designed for playing games.

Linux is a kernel. SteamOS is an operating system.

You could argue that SteamOS is a modified Ubuntu(?) and not a clean sheet gaming OS but I’m not sure that distinction really matters. SteamOS is a purpose built OS.

> an OS developed specifically for playing games

This is what consoles try to achieve. And they do one better by not having to deal with countless combinations of hardware and software. They are optimized (performance, stability, compatibility) to run games on unified setups and with a guarantee they will run for years. They also curb piracy and cheating which is something the videogame industry really wants. The downside is not having the leading edge specs every year.

The problem is the market for a very gaming-focused but still general OS that can run on generic hardware is just not that attractive for most users of the videogame industry. And truth be told I doubt it would be any better than any generic OS you already have now.

Personally since XP SP3 the biggest problems I've had were almost exclusively with drivers, save for a few Spectre/Meltdown mitigation issues.

I'm constantly surprised that updating a system is such a massive problem. It's great that updates can be easily applied through the internet these days, but it mostly seems to hurt the user experience, taking their system away from them, killing their work.

Why can't updates be run in the background, ready to be applied when you want it to? Give me a notification that says: "Application X is ready to update to a new version. Your work will be saved and restored. The update will take approximately X minutes." With buttons "Update now", "Postpone until tomorrow", etc.

And can we please update applications without requiring the entire system to reboot? Is it odd to think only kernel updates should require a reboot? In fact, this might be a great argument for a microkernel architecture; the less the kernel does, the less it needs to be rebooted. Make every other aspect of the OS individually updateable without a full reboot. That would be pretty awesome if it's possible. (Unfortunately I'm not enough of an OS guru to know if this can work.)

Linux distribution package managers work like this. Updates can run in the background, processes pick up new libraries whenever they are restarted, but updates can happen before that during normal operation mostly without any disturbance (there are some exceptions to this, e.g. Firefox behaves strangely if updated while running). Unix file systems generally allow overwriting files in use, processes that already had it open get the old version, new processes get the new file transparently. Only kernel updates really need a reboot, and the occasional related stuff like kernel modules (but even that is rare, you can e.g. update your Nvidia driver and only need to restart X11, not the kernel, however, it is easier to just reboot). There is e.g. checkrestart and similar tools that tell you which processes you might want to restart after a given update by checking library dependencies.

There are occasional rare glitches this system wouldn't catch, like e.g. artwork being changed resulting in a mix of old and new icons, but that doesn't happen if you just stick to normal releases of stable distributions like Debian.

I always pity my windows colleagues in the week after patch tuesday. Our Linux boxes are automatically updated 4 times a day, reboot is automated for login servers for when nobody is logged in (with some help of loadbalancing), other servers generate a mail and we reboot them when convenient. But reboots are rare. Automatic unattended updates breaking stuff is even more rare, I think two instances in 10 years.

An important corollary: if you turn off your computer when you’re not actively using it, you’re going to have a bad time. The updates that are supposed to happen in the background instead force you to wait while they run.

So you have to save and shut down everything at the end of the day to not lose work, but also leave the computer eating electricity in case it wants to update.

The best is when your computer crashes with a blue screen right in the working on something, then adds insult to injury by doing updates for the next 45 minutes after the restart.

To avoid this, I'm using Hibernate mode, and occasionally using shutdown/restart.

If you use hibernate, you kinda have to turn off scheduled tasks, or else it starts up in the middle of the night to check for updates, then, potentially, run for hours.

Might have been more of a problem for me, as I have the PC in my bedroom.

Yep, this has happened when putting it into Sleep mode. Might as well happen in Hybrid Sleep. And in advanced power settings you can disable wake timers, but I'm not sure if it helps.

Tried automating the removal of scheduled tasks (like the Compatibility runner which made the laptop sound like an airplane) and snoozed the updates for a few weeks. In the end, it broke the Scheduler, the task was still launching, and had to reset the OS to a proper state. It's a love and hate relationship with this OS.

This is why I run Windows in a VM. Want to turn your machine off? Suspend the VM and shut down Linux.

Not only that but if powered off, the windows machine will actively power itself on late in the night unless drastic measures are taken to disable this feature. The amount of times I have been spooked by ventilation noise + monitors turning on at 2am is far too much.

This is exactly why I changed all of my personal machines to Linux. Unfortunately I'm bound to Windows at work (work is a MS shop).

The real issue is that Windows updates themselves take way too long, and mostly seem to require a restart. Why is the former worse than before and the latter still so bad?

The removal of incremental patching means most major updates are now secretly a reinstall. This has increased system stability - now patched installs and fresh installs are the same. The rebooting even for minor updates is due to files not being able to be changed while they're open, so a change to, ex, gdi32.dll is going to prompt a restart, regardless of the size.

That doesn't really explain why an updated to, say, .NET forces a restart. Far too many updates force restarts when it seems they shouldn't require it. It's not just the main OS updates.

I'm guessing applications will be running with the old libraries loaded and developers should be able to count on this one-version-only situation (e.g. ABI between processes). Forcing a restart is just the simple but crude way of ensuring that no applications are using any system files (.NET is part of the OS, up until .NET Core).

Most of the time, you can just ignore the restart option. It seems to be the windows philosophy to just throw a restart in for good measure.

I was annoyed that it doesn’t let you block out more than 18 hours in a 24 hour period. I legitimately do have 20ish hours of possible active hours.

You can set active hours through PowerShell:

  Set-ItemProperty -Path HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsUpdate\UX\Settings -Name ActiveHours[Start|End] -Value xx

So, while this is a really bad idea in practice, theoretically you could have a Scheduled Task that keeps changing your active hours in a rolling window so you never hit it.

After 14 days, updates will be applied regardless of active hours.

I wasn't suggesting anyone actually do this

I'm sure they'll put in additional restrictions along the lines of "you can change your active hours up to 5 times during the next 30 days" at some point...

I wonder if it is possible to prevent updates by blocking connections to MS's servers via firewall rules or DNS?

the best way i found so far is to install ancient version of win10, prior to creator's update, block it in group policy, and set up a registry key that your lan connection is metered.

Upside: you have full control over when your updates will be downloaded, and when they will be applied.

Downside: you have to update manually.

I'm a Mac user, so I'm used to the OS respecting me, but as I sometimes need to build and debug Windows stuff, I do have a VM with Windows 10. I use it maybe once a month, sometimes rarer. Every time I ran the VM, there inevitably were new updates. These forced updates pissed me off enough to figure out how to turn the update system off altogether.

If anyone's interested, here's how it works. There are several services related to Windows Update. Some of them have their state controls in services.msc greyed out so you presumably can't stop them. But if you leave just one of them on, it'll reactivate the rest of them and guess what, you're getting annoyed again. So you have to look for all services that have the word "update" in their name or description, and set their state to "disabled" directly in the registry, then reboot. I did this more than a year ago, and haven't had a single update prompt ever since.

You should probably also disable everything related to telemetry while you're at it. And uninstall the Windows Store, it's useless anyway.

Somebody downvoted parent without adding a comment. Is that information factually incorrect?

There's this weird category of people who think that

- Updates are so important for security you have to install them the second they come out (some are, but most are not), don't you dare even THINK about using outdated/unsupported software that works just fine

- You have no right to mess with the software running on the hardware you own

It's Not Your Computer.

>or learn more about this Linux alternative everyone is talking about …

And then quickly abandon it when they try to get 4K netflix working on it

4K Netflix works great under Linux, provided you download it using Bittorrent instead of https.

I honestly don't even feel the need to have netflix in the first place. Most shows are just kinda garbage.

I think the author really misunderstood the term "active hours"

If you are using windows without actively trying to switch everything to or some of your critical personal work to a different OS you are an idiot. Yes there are some software that might not work on linux, or the alternatives might not have a feature you got on windows but you if are willing to give up control of your own PC for some convenience you deserve to be treated like this by corporations.

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