Microsoft Windows updates while it's in use

[Leo Enticknap]

Instead of "disabling automatic updating completely," I should have phrased it as "enable updating to be fully controlled by the end user." Sure, in a mission and/or security critical use case, updates to patch vulnerabilities are essential to install regularly, but the owner of the PC needs to be in complete control of when that updating takes place, and with the ability to add their own safeguards (e.g. take a Clonezilla image of the system drive before the updating, in case the update process breaks something and a quick and foolproof way of rolling back is needed). That, of course, places a big responsibility on the IT departments of businesses that have to use an enhanced security regime such as Randy's to make sure that the updating actually happens. From the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack last year and numerous other lower profile incidents (for some reason, school districts seem to be hit with ransomware on a regular basis), we know what happens if they neglect the gruntwork of IT security.

[Steve Guttag]

I have no problem with an IT department setting their update standards for machines under their control. But on my computer, it is my decision as to what updates, if any, I apply and when to apply them.

[Bobby Henderson]

I can't recall any issues of Windows forcing me to shut down my computer and reboot to install an update, much less apply an update while I wasn't expecting it. Still, some of the updates can be pretty bad. I'm not too fond of Windows 11. I've kept Windows 10 Pro installed on my personal Alienware X17 notebook. I have Win 11 Pro on my desktop at work.

I'm not an expert at computers. Maybe I'm pretty good but no expert. Even today, I can't understand why anybody would use ANYTHING from Microsoft to try to get work done.

Depending on the industry in which you work you may have no choice. I work in the sign industry. By a very extreme margin the best industry specific software available for that industry has been Windows-based. Prior to that it was MS-DOS. Not Mac. At all. Zero. The Mac platform has never had a good footing in this industry, despite the "cousin" type relevance graphics for print publishing has had since the late 1980's. I guess sign making was just too icky "blue collar" for Apple to dirty itself dealing with us "losers." We've been having to drive computer controlled routing tables, vinyl cutters and then large format printers with the options available. The Mac platform has never ever been at the forefront of that stuff.

I like Adobe's applications a lot, but in the sign industry some competing software, such as CorelDRAW still has a strong following. And that's because Corel devoted its development resources at the PC platform while Adobe had a more slippery policy. Adobe really pissed me off in the mid 1990's when they released versions 5, 5.5 and 6 of Adobe Illustrator for the Mac platform while ignoring Windows. Then they angered me even more by making AI 5.5 available for Silicon Graphics IRIX but leaving us "loser" Windows users stuck with the primitive version 4. I started using Macromedia Freehand as a fuck-you response. It was a Postscript-based vector drawing application like Illustrator and could even paste AICB vector paths into Adobe Photoshop. When the web page building revolution hit in the late 1990's --very largely with WINDOWS PCs-- Adobe saw where the money was and dropped the Mac-only bullshit.

Waiting for the day when the complete OS is "in the cloud" and they have total control over when you use your computer.

I don't see that happening ever. Computer users are getting spoiled very quickly by the behavior of modern NVMe Solid State "hard discs." Computers boot up very quickly and launch applications very quickly from such drives. The downside is you have little to no warning when such a SSD is going bad. One of my co-worker's computers went down last Monday. This machine was just over a year old. One moment the PC was working perfectly. Next moment the boot SSD was stone dead. I'm glad I ordered this system with two physical hard drives; with a second one being an old-fashion 2 terabyte platter-based drive. It took the better part of a day to replace the dead drive and reinstall applications. At least we didn't lose any data.

Given the current state of computers I do not recommend anyone to leave any data they want to keep stored on the computer itself. Back everything up to external hard discs and/or cloud services if possible. If a bad Windows update makes your computer shit the bed, or if you get hit with a ransomware attack or the boot SSD toasts itself you're not going to be out of luck. It's not hard to replace a scorched SSD and reinstall the OS and applications.

The key thing is the computer user must be organized UP FRONT just in case those bad things happen. Most people stupidly are not. They have no idea about their user names and logins for all the applications they use. When my co-worker's boot SSD shit the bed I basically saved the company a whole lot of money by preventing us from having to buy a bunch of software again outright. I knew how to get her MS Office, Adobe Creative Cloud, Flexi and Corel software installed without any new purchases.

I totally get all the negative criticism directed at Microsoft for the stupid stuff they do with Windows. I would personally love to bash the living hell out of the developers responsible for Windows Ink. I have a Wacom graphics tablet connected to my computer and can't use it properly because of the Windows Ink shit-ware. Windows Ink has to be enabled to allow any pressure sensitive functions with the stylus. But if Windows Ink is enabled all sort of extremely infuriating things happen that interfere with my graphics applications. I cannot press down the stylus tip and drag without some asshole circle icon fucker thing popping up in the way. So that disables animated zoom or being able to click and drag slider icons in the user interfaces of applications. Windows Ink is just the stupidest fucking shit Microsoft has done in recent times. My computer is a computer. It is not a fucking Samsung Note 5. I actually used a Note 5 for several years and now have a Galaxy S22 Ultra. But I don't need computers I use acting like my fucking phone. I just so want to drop-kick a Microsoft executive in the balls right now.

If I want to digitally draw something and get pressure sensitive response out of the device I have to use my iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. The fucking Wacom tablet is a no-go for that.

I still have Adobe CS-4 that runs on my computer just fine. Same for Final Cut 6. I'm moving from Adobe to GIMP/Inkscape because of Adobe's subscription model. I am using Adobe less and less. Eventually I won't need it at all. Final Cut, I don't use regularly but I still can when I want to.

Inkscape is okay for casual hobbyist graphics purposes. It's a lousy application for professional purposes. It only works in RGB mode. The user interface is like stepping into the way-back machine to 1994. I'll often recommend Affinity Designer to amateurs wanting to D-I-Y their own graphics. That application has some serious limitations, but if Serif works at it hard enough it could be a viable alternative to CorelDRAW or Adobe Illustrator.

[Harold Hallikainen]

On backups, I use rsync to back up my Documents directory to my virtual private server (in Germany, so it's off site). Then, at the start of each month, I do a drive image backup to a USB drive using G4L. I keep the USB drive (alternating monthly) off site at my brother's house. The drive image backup removes the need to reinstall applications. Also, the VPS is backed up to Google Drive once a month.

So, I THINK I'm safe!

[Randy Stankey]

I would personally love to bash the living hell out of the developers responsible for Windows Ink.

Oh? You mean, "i-Ink?"

I thought that was for pads and phones so that people could write or draw with their finger. Using a graphics tablet, I imagine you'd want to turn it off. Or, better, just never turn it on in the first place.

Personally, I think handwriting recognition, voice recognition and the like are for the birds. Yes, voice recognition and text-to-speech are great for blind people. Handwriting recognition might be good for people with other handicaps (IDK, just suggesting) but for the majority of people, they'd be better off just learning to type. There may be debate about the number of WPM a typist can type vs. speech but that doesn't take into account for the fact that most computer users don't type continuously. They type or use the mouse in short bursts. Using CMD-P to print is much faster than using a mouse and saying, "Computer-PRINT-page," is just too cumbersome.

Sure, handwriting recognition is nice but I look at it the same way we used to think about calculators when I was in school. Calculators are helpful when you have a page full of figures to calculate, if you're doing complex math or, in business, you need to get the right answer quickly but you shouldn't use a calculator until you learn to do math correctly, in the first place. Calculators are for helping people when they need it, not for doing things people should know how to do for themselves. Same goes for writing/speech recognition. They are HELPERS, not crutches!

Thanks for the tip on Affinity vs. Inkscape.

I haven't totally converted from one to another yet. I'm still deciding. Good to know about not supporting anything but RGB.

I wouldn't say I'm an amateur but, neither am I a pro. Somewhere in between.
Historically, I would be responsible for producing work that's shipped out to others for final disposition or seeing to the work getting done. At Mercyhurst, we would make ads for TV, print, radio or billboards that would be sent to people at the printer or TV station, etc. for printing or broadcast. Part of my job was to stay in contact with the people at the print shop, for example, and make sure that the we sent them media in a format that they could use. Yes, we had a few problems like people sending video files with text that goes out of the overscan/safe areas or files in RGB that should have been in another format.

I remember one time, we ordered a billboard for a big show that was coming up. My boss told me that they had gone up, earlier that day, and he wanted me to drive by on my way home to see it. I came in the next day and he asked me what I thought. I said, "It's GREEN!" Turns out that somebody used the wrong color settings but nobody caught it before it went to print. The billboard company just printed it as-is because they expected us to use the color settings that they had already provided us.

I might know a thing or two about how to use colors on computers but I don't know everything. I know what color space is and I know that you're supposed to use the right settings for a particular purpose. I just need to ask what to do, first. You, on the other hand, that's like a walk in the park!

I don't NEED Adobe. I'd use it to its full potential, maybe once or twice in a year. Creating brochures, signs and pamphlets for people or transferring old videos to DVD or digital video and stuff like that. Basically, I do it for "beer money" so to speak. Pretty good but professional by no means.

Whatever I think about Adobe vs. other companies, I just don't need all that stuff and, frankly, it'd be a waste of money even if I could afford it.

I picked Inkscape because I see and hear a lot of people who use it. Same goes for Affinity. Until you mentioned that thing about RGB, I kinda' figured they were about a horse apiece.

[Bobby Henderson]

I thought that was for pads and phones so that people could write or draw with their finger. Using a graphics tablet, I imagine you'd want to turn it off. Or, better, just never turn it on in the first place.

I keep Windows Ink disabled. But for whatever reason Wacom's graphic tablet drivers force users to enable Windows Ink to get any pressure sensitivity functions out of a Wacom pen. So I just have to do without. I've gone through the Windows Ink settings in the operating system and tried to turn off as much of its crap as I can, but the aggravations are still there -like that asshole circle icon that appears whenever I press and drag the pen tip. I'm telling you even the most "chill" person would quickly get infuriated with that crap jumping in the way.

Speaking of things jumping in the way, another thing that really pisses me off about Windows Ink is its tendency to throw a handwriting pop-up window directly in the way when you click the pen into any text entry field. It could be the web address bar in a web browser or a block of paragraph text in a page layout. The pop up jumps in the way even when I tell the OS to disable it. Windows doesn't listen. If you have a graphics tablet connected to a PC then Windows Ink tries to make you use your computer as if you were using an Apple Newton from the fucking early 1990's.

By comparison, my iPad Pro has a pop-up window thingie to turn handwriting into text, but it's a function that is turned off by default and is easy to disable. Most of the time if I need to type text into an iPad I'll just use the on-screen keyboard. I can type text on that a hell of a lot faster than writing it by hand.

I am 100% convinced that the "software engineers" at Microsoft do not even bother actually using the software they code. I doubt if they're listening to any user feedback either. This Windows Ink shit has been going on for several years.

I think Microsoft force-fed Windows Ink into the general operating system as a marketing ploy to sell Microsoft Surface products. Even if I had a folding Surface computer I would get pissed off by that Windows Ink nonsense. I don't even know what options that circle icon is supposed to be offering when you press and drag the pen tip. The only purpose it seems to have is preventing you from using a stylus fully.

Thanks for the tip on Affinity vs. Inkscape.

Another low-cost vector app to check out is VectorStyler. They have free demos available. It looks like it has a more impressive feature set than Affinity Designer. For one thing, it fully supports OpenType Variable and OpenType SVG fonts and can open Adobe Illustrator files and support Illustrator-specific features like its vector-based art and scatter brushes.

Inkscape is not bad for being free/open source. It's just that any SVG artwork created in it would need to be round-tripped through another graphics application to convert into CMYK color space for professional print output.

At my workplace we have to use the Adobe stuff. Most branding assets from big companies are created in applications like Illustrator. Rival graphics applications can do a lot of the same things as Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, etc. But there are too many gaps in terms of feature overlap. I've seen Illustrator files do really wacky, unpredictable things when importing them directly into CorelDRAW or Affinity Designer. The same screwy things can happen going the other direction too. It's definitely a thing I watch out for when I am designing a logo or other kinds of graphics for someone. I'll convert any live type to outlines and "flatten" or "expand" as many application-dependent effects as possible so the end result will work in more "generic" formats like EPS. Most people doing graphic design work do not consider those issues.

[Randy Stankey]

It seems like the best strategy, for me, would be to get, for instance, Affinity and Inkscape then use them alternately, depending on what I need to do.

Maybe Inkscape would be good for everyday stuff then Affinity or Vector for things I need to send out or if I need some feature that another doesn’t have.

A newer computer should probably be in the mix, too, but that will have to be down the road.

[Frank Cox]

Steam powered computer
Victorian-Retro-Steampunk-Computer-by-Datamancer.jpg

[Bobby Henderson]

Currently it's still a pretty lousy time to buy a new computer. The crypto mining fad has died down a lot and the covid pandemic is getting farther into the rear view mirror. Prices for high end computer parts like video cards have fallen close to MSRP levels. But those prices are still pretty damn high compared to what MSRP levels were 3 or so years ago.

There might be some hope for lower prices ahead. Consumer demand for new computers is down. The tech industry has been laying off workers in numbers not seen since the dot-com bubble burst 20+ years ago. Some of those layoffs have been corrections from over-hiring (particularly remote workers). High price inflation on basics like food and rent are making discretionary purchases (such as a new gaming PC) less affordable.

If NVidia and AMD want to keep pushing prices of their top end gaming cards past the $1500 or $2000 barrier they're not going to get nearly as many buyers (especially since scalpers can no longer make extra money re-selling the things). NVidia and AMD could even end up losing a lot of money on a new product line if it's priced too far out of reach. They have to sink a certain amount of money into developing, fabricating and marketing a specific product. Normally a high end video card would be a profit generator. If sales levels are garbage compared to rosy forecasts they have to fall back on sales of lower end, less profitable cards.

Maybe in another year or two there will be a pretty noticeable shake-up with computer pricing. I don't see how they can sustain the price-gouging unless the American dollar itself loses a great deal of value. Then they'll be able to get away with charging $1600 for a video card.

[Marco Giustini]

Instead of "disabling automatic updating completely," I should have phrased it as "enable updating to be fully controlled by the end user." Sure, in a mission and/or security critical use case, updates to patch vulnerabilities are essential to install regularly, but the owner of the PC needs to be in complete control of when that updating takes place,

I don't disagree but if you give the tool to disable the updates, lots of people would just disable them.
If you give control... well, you can't just not do the updates forever, can you? Otherwise is the same as disabling it.

MS was pretty aggressive at the beginning, I feel they reached a reasonable spot now where updates are forced by leaving the user some control.

I see your point Steve but you have to think from the large corporation's point of view, responsible for the largest part of the operating systems of the planet. "Give the user the ability to disable the updates" cannot be an option in 2023. I think with Windows Enterprise you have the ability to set your own internal update schedule and do what you want basically - but I guess it's not cheap and/or easy

One thing I think they removed and I miss is the "do not install updates as soon as they are launched". I had the maximum delay set on my system so bugged updates would hopefully not reach me. This seems to have been removed.

Anyways, I don't mean to convince anybody of course. I see and respect your points, which are valid BTW.

[Ed Gordon]

Microsoft Update for Business

Windows 10 Home pushes patches to your PC immediately, allowing you to defer installation for a few hours, but no longer. For some, that might not be the most desirable option. Windows 10 Professional offers an option, as our tutorial in how to manage Windows 10 updates explains. If you’re frustrated by unexpected Windows 10 updates that reboot your PC, Windows 10 Pro may be for you. While Microsoft has now made many of these options now available to Windows 10 Home, the ability to defer feature updates for up to 365 days is still reserved for Windows 10 Pro.

As history has proven, Murphy’s Law can trigger an update at an inopportune time. Deferring the update means that you’ll be able to update your PC when you choose to, and when all the bugs have been worked out.

Source:https://www.pcworld.com/article/4227...o-upgrade.html

The article this came from is nearly 3 years old. I don't delay updates at all. Windows knows my active use hours and does it's thing when I am not using it. Most if not all updates notify you to reboot to finish the update, but do not demand you do it now. I have gotten updates that I suspect caused a problem, but you always have the option to remove the update and then delay a re-install (unless you have run Windows disk cleanup and selected the option to cleanup Windows update). If the system is critical, you will have already done a full system image backup that can be restored in minutes should the worst happen.

Now if only Microsoft would give us an option to bypass the crap-ware ("new features") in Windows 10 Professional, I'd be a happy camper!

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't know why Microsoft still sells "home" versions of Windows. It's always a hurdle to deal with when ordering a new computer or installing Windows clean on a new hard drive for an existing PC. If I recall correctly a PC loaded with a "home" version of Windows will not work in a network domain with more than 3 or 4 other PCs. We have 11 systems connected at my workplace. So we have a mix of systems running Win 10 Pro and Win 11 Pro.

While the pushed updates are sometimes a pain in the ass, I do have to say its easier and faster to get a new computer system up and running than it has been in the past. Depending on the software company I keep backups of application installers. Others like Adobe Creative Cloud or MS Office are very simple to reinstall (of course this also requires a decent Internet connection). It also helps tremendously to keep work files organized and properly backed up.

[Henry Atkinson]

The thing that I haven't seen mentioned here yet is that MS does give you the tools both to control when you get updates on any already-installed copy of Windows, and publishes a version of Windows expressly for the use-case I'm seeing described, where you don't want feature updates but do want a secure, modern OS with minimal bloat. Look at Windows 10 LTSC.

[Martin McCaffery]

Last night, we were, of course, running late. 10 mins before opening I turned on the computer that handles our ticket sales. I get the Windows updating notice with the don't turn off your computer warning. It took 35mins to update. On a regular night it wouldn't have been much of a bother, but this was a special screening so we were what passes for slammed here. Everyone had to buy their tix at the concessions stand, which made that even more chaotic.
Finally got onto the POS abou 5 mins before showtime and picked up a little of the slack.
One would think at the very least Windows would ask if this is a good time to update.

[Darin Steffl]

Why didn't you run the update when you shut the computer down instead? That seems like the best time to me since it'll update itself when you don't need it, then turn off.

I've never had an update run immediately after turning on a PC so I don't understand how that happened to you. The only time I've seen an update run is automatically overnight, when I manually tell it to, or when I select "update and shutdown" option.