Microsoft Confirms Windows 10 Updates Cannot Be Stopped
erco
Posts: 20,256
Win10 is a Juggernaut! Bash away, Linux Fanboys... 
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/07/17/windows-10-forced-automatic-updates/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/07/17/windows-10-forced-automatic-updates/?utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix
Comments
The most brain-dead aspect of MS 'auto updates' is They are God, and they will whip your PC out from under you, and restart it with NO Deferral choices.
Much smarter would be to give the user control, and request a time when it would suit the user.
I imagine a couple of lawsuits over this, will change their thinking. This is kite flying, as they test the waters.
Unmaintained home computers are making life ugly for a lot of us.
Giving users control has just not gone well.
Any savvy user can manage this with their firewall, or get Pro and be that user able to make effective use of the control.
A while back, I just quit doing free friends and family tech support. It's a mess. Some got macs, some abandoned the PC and use mobile, or a tablet, Chrome book, etc...
Some started paying (not me) and got a lot smarter a couple grand later too.
-Phil
Not always. Seems to run in phases.
Right now, I'm good. Everything can update and it all works. ..until it doesn't. The problem I have is I can't keep that machine in the past for too long, or it's not going to work as clients environments would, which ruins all the tests and such I do.
Therefore I manually decide when I will allow updates (windoze, iOS for my iPhone and iPad, etc). This is either when I have free wifi access or near month end when I have unused data available.
No way can I allow windoze to automatically update!
Therefore I manually decide when I will allow updates (windoze, iOS for my iPhone and iPad, etc). This is either when I have free wifi access or near month end when I have unused data available.
No way can I allow windoze to automatically update!
There will be large numbers in exactly this situation, but I guess none near Redmond !!
I guess Microsoft have no plans for Windows 10 on Tablets either ? ... Tablets routinely move into and out of Wifi access... with much more expensive mobile charges elsewhere.
Lots of angst across the net about the auto-upgrade policy.
However one person's post made a lot of sense.
W10 Home is just that, for the Home User. The ones who really do need to have someone maintaining and updating their OS.
I am quite sure there will be a borked upgrade sometime, and MS will have some sort of Restore function for Home that will do just that, until they figure out the issue and then go back to auto-updating.
All the people complaining are exactly the sort of people who should NOT be running WW10 Home, but a higher level release that will have that option disable-able, because they are more technically inclined than the average home user.
Makes perfect sense. The only problem is that the Pro/Ultimate version is an extra $50-100....
On the other hand, I'm haven't seen any evidence that someone using Home can't update Windows Firewall, or 3rd party firewall to simply block access to the update servers.
It's in and out all the time, and the updates just get incrementally downloaded and I don't notice it.
If Microsoft is going to mandate home edition updates on the tablets, I'm sure they will do this, or some utility or other will do this for people like Cluso running on a hot spot / mobile type arrangement.
(which is a pretty smart way to go sometimes I did it for about a year, and it was totally workable)
One big question that remains though is what is the "lifetime" of a device since Microsoft says they will continue to provide updates for the lifetime of the device.
Well, being able to put them off generally works for me. I'll be fine with Pro when that day comes. It's easy enough to make sure it doesn't talk to the mothership. And I can't blame 'em for that. Pro is out there and borked too.
As for lifetime... Well, my T60P thinkpad was good for 10 years. My current Thinkpad is 5, and it's still a very relevant machine. Frankly, unless there is some very significant gain in mobile CPUs, it's going to be a lot more relevant at 10 years than the T60 was. (core duo compared to i7)
- Browse the web
- Check email
- Chat
- Play games
- do documents and spreadsheets
- program
So is it still relevant?I could put Windows 7 on that T60 and it would do CAD, Office, Graphics, and generally perform at a modest office desktop level. I've had Win 7 on it in the past. Did it for a test before I bought my current machine. Was just fine.
The difference over 10 years now is much less than it was during the C64 time, and the 90's, and the 00's, due to CPU process technology and overall speed hitting a plateau during the 00's.
A C64 is ~1Mhz, and yes pretty amazing things can be done. My Apple ][ is also 1Mhz, and it does those same similar things. In fact, I've got a card that lets me use a modern USB thumb drive. It's pretty awesome. I'll boot the Apple, do some stuff, write, make graphics, collect data, compute something, save, and put the thumb drive into a modern machine and go. Nice, but not really relevant in the support it, or even anybody besides retro fans caring about it sense.
On the other hand, I could put that T60p in front of somebody and have it running Win 7 or better, and people would use it with probably zero issues. That's what I mean by relelvant.
Tablets and mobile? Still growing. Shorter times could make great sense.
Hardware just isn't changing quick enough in the PC space to age out all that quickly.
The whole, updates for life of product is going to be a very interesting discussion.
Currently 4 of 5 laptops here are 8-9 years old. But they keep getting slower every time I permit windoze to update
You can get one of the better SSD 128GB for like $80-90 now. Actually, I think 240256GB is now the $100-110 sweetspot.
Seriously, get one and make it your main boot/OS drive.
Going from 100+ IOPS to 15000-45000 IOPS with excellent 4KB reads makes the CPU the bottleneck almost.
If you haven't gone SSD by now, maybe you shouldn't. You'll just kick yourself at how much faster everything is, and how long you've been denying yourself.
The tech is pretty solid now. I still clone to a physical, just in case disk. Should anyway.
Two use cases for me are like night and day:
1. Virtual scenarios, enterprise. Running VM Server, VM Client, local apps.
2. Mechanical CAD, large models.
Just time savings paid for the SSD quickly. Like a few weeks.
I second the SSD idea. Putting an SSD into my ancient AMD 64 a couple of years back was an eye opener. The most dramatic performance upgrade I ever made to any machine.
Nonetheless, it was amazingly quick to boot and run. And it became very obvious that 4Gbytes was just about all the storage an average person really requires. If I needed additional storage, I used SDcards.
Backing up the full image took 20 minutes. Restoring a corrupted imaged took another 20 minutes. I just don't see how anyone can clone a 1Tbyte hard disk without having a second computer to use while the first is tied up.
These days, even my regular bloated Linux images run merely 40 or so Gbytes. Yes I should get an SSD again. But won't MS want me to buy another Windows license if I change hard disks?
Boot live Linux, run from RAM, start clone, sleep, reboot when wake up.
One should never be cloning a terabyte at a time.
Backup should be an ongoing and incremental process. Distributed over many machines.
In fact, I don't thing "backup" is a good idea at all. A backup is a static dead thing that we only think about in an emergency and then find it does not work!
No, what we want is an ongoing replication of our data to multiple redundant places all of which are of the same status.
Thank you git for showing the way on that.
Backups are mostly partial, using a Tower of Hanoi scheme with occasional full backups
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backup_rotation_scheme
And when one must have a full image, use the Unix 'dd' utility.