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Comment by NDizzle | Hacker News Reader

Since when does Windows have mandatory automatic updates?!

Windows 10 Home used to have mandatory automatic updates:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...

The situation improved after the May 2019 update, but the updates will still be automatically installed after you pause them every 7 days for a maximum of 5 times (35 days total):

https://www.howtogeek.com/410183/microsoft-abandons-windows-...

Automatically installed, yet no automatic reboots. Maybe it’s because I’ve never used the Home edition, but I’ve never had Windows force a reboot on me. Sometimes my laptop won’t wake up out of sleep mode and it reboots, but that’s about every 2 months.

The last time I was really angry about Windows was with Window Me. The entire TCP stack took a dive which I couldn’t recover from. Even replaced the NIC. Replaced that with Windows 2000 and haven’t had a serious issue since.

Warning, loud: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzJhdkIZ8yc

Staged Windows updates are a pretty common source of behaviors that do require reboots.

Everything from HID devices not responding, task manager and utilities like Settings not opening, device drivers left in an unstable state, and more can happen. To their credit, it does usually fail in a way that allows users to close applications before they're compelled to restart.

Windows 10 pro also did that. Not sure if it still does, because after it happened to me once I waded into the policy editor and disabled all that shite. However, there was at least one forced update that happened to me after that. No idea why.

But windows is also weird. People always talk about ads or having candy crush forcefully reinstalled after updates. I strongly suspect these things vary by region, because those two at least I never noticed.

There is a difference between used to and straight away saying, mandatory reboots. Implies it still does.

I’ve had Windows spontaneously restart on me while I’m doing stuff, to apply an update. If it was somehow my fault, I have no idea what caused it, and so it’s Microsoft’s fault after all since it wasn’t clear.

My computer once decided that 1 A.M. in the night is a great time to automagically boot up and do updates. I had to physically turn off power, so it wasn't able to do that. Even disabling that feature in the bios didn't work for some reason. I still don't know how the machine was able to do it. Fast boot wasn't even enabled, because it caused other problems when it was.

It stopped happening someday, but it's still haunting me. It doesn't really build trust.

On Linux, one can instruct the BIOS to turn on the computer at a specified time after suspend or even power off using rtcwake [1]. I don't know many things about Windows but I guess they are doing something like this.

[1] https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/rtcwake.8.html

Yeah, that's what i tried to turn off in the BIOS. It's actually one of the earlier UEFI enabled ones from MSI. I guess it's a bit bugged. It also tends to freeze when i have it open for too long. There are no updates anymore and i don't get a decent CPU for it, so i'll probably upgrade it soon-ish. Just not sure if i'll get MSI again or maybe try something else this time. Asus seems neat.

Since Windows 10. It is possible to disable it, but Microsoft fought very hard to prevent people from doing so by putting up a ton of road blocks. It was a loudly decried 'feature'.

I'm not sure which update exactly - at least a couple of years ago now, but this was removed for regular updates.

You don't get the forced reboot until your version goes EOL - you'd have to ignore updates for years for that.

Edit: it was may 2019 as per another commenter

I've never, over 3 laptops, had it restart by itself. Not once. Not a single one of them on Home edition, so perhaps that's the issue.

Then again, the "home edition" is the edition that you should use when you are streaming live on twitch to 10,000 people!

It’s happened to me on home edition.

If you intentionally restart you computer every week or two it will never happen to you though. Or set your computer up to not do it.

Not mandatory, but the default settings are a bit unfortunate.

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