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Good luck with that. I have a Windows computer I sometimes have to run stuff on overnight, like renders or what not. I've disabled everything I can related to Windows Update, plus setting "Active hours" or what not, so the computer doesn't reboot because of updates in the middle of the night.

Today I woke up, went to check the progress and wouldn't you know, Windows Update updated the computer and rebooted, and what I was waiting for was aborted... So fucking tiresome to use shit like this.

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That's the biggest reason why I stayed on Windows 7 for so long. I could run Blender for two or three days and not give a shit. Meanwhile my friends couldn't even play a game of Factorio without Windows hijacking the computer and rebooting. There was an infamous incident years ago, early in the life of Windows 10, where members of Achievement Hunter lost half of an episode because one of the computers that recorded the audio tracks decided it had to update while they were recording. This has been going on for a decade now and shows no signs of being stopped.

I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this. They load up the software they need, then it never goes online again, so updates can never bother them or otherwise get in the way. The software thus stays exactly as they want it to be. It's an appliance at that point.

It's annoying to have to shuffle files over to it, if that's needed for its job, but I think it's still a worthwhile thing to consider (it's insane that we've gotten to this point, but such is life). If it isn't workable, then fine. But if it is, the hassle of shuffling files using external SSDs or whatever is probably better, or at the very least more consistent, than turning on your machine one day and finding it corrupted itself due to an update, or the software in question got a UI update which breaks your workflow for a month.

Hm, yeah, can't really disconnect it, I'm using it for (local) CI purposes as well. I could disconnect it from the internet though, keep the local connection, but maybe actually explicitly blocking anything windows/microsoft for the period I want it to stay online, might work sufficiently.

Regardless, thanks for the ideas!

> I've seen people resorting to disconnecting machines from the internet to prevent this.

The Windows Update processes were really a stubborn bunch in W10 - not sure if anything have changed in W11. These probably were given the highest privileges that made them spawn periodically outside any scheduled tasks settings somehow. Some 3rd-party tools were able to neuter most of them but these were like zombies. Continuously rising up.

Windows power / restart has gotten absolutely fucked in the last 10 years.

Hibernate? Gone by default.

Sleep? Ineffective 1/2 the time because a Microsoft utility force-wakes it.

It's sad that 15 year old Windows system was more usable than one today.

Close Windows laptop and leave it on desk, open in morning... 50/50 chance:

1. Laptop has most of its battery life still because it slept successfully and predictably

2. Laptop drained battery to 5% and only then slept

Have you tried using a program that regularly simulates keypresses or mouse movements so the computer thinks the user is still active? The `SCROLL` key for instance can be pressed without causing unwanted side effects, but it stops my Windoze VM from going to sleep.

I have not, interesting idea and I'll definitively try it out. Thanks!

There are some well-known scripts. All variants of the same pattern.

E.g. https://gist.github.com/LuisAGC/843a2a45617d7ad05687c2f8a15c... or https://github.com/TheBear1616/CapsLock-PreventSleep-Script/...

Scroll lock and F13 are commonly used

I much prefer an ahk script to move the mouse a few pixels periodically...

haha this reminds me of what I did for my speakers. They turn themselves off after about 1 and a half hours of silence. So I added a cuckoo clock chime on the hour. Problem solved.

Turn off almost all outbound connections in Windows firewall, except the ones your apps actually use. Then it never gets updates unless you install them yourself.

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